IVTHE IMMIGRANTS
APRIL—THE GOOSE MOON
APRIL—THE GOOSE MOON
It was early in April, an hour before sunset. The keen wind that blew down through the valley, sweeping the forge pond into little ripples, was tinkling with spring sounds,—wayside voices of robin, meadow-lark, purple finch, and cheery song sparrow; the red-wing’s good-night blending with the piping of the marsh frogs; music of little brooks newly born of melted ice and spring rain on the rocky hillsides; here and there the chime of cow bells worn by Peter Salop’s rambling herd returning from their first day’s browsing in the brush lots,—all blended into the steady rhythm of the water as it fell in an unbroken sheet from the pond’s edge upon the rocks below.
Spring rushed toward the ear that evening more swiftly than to the eye. There were yellow tassels of fragrant spice-bush in moist warm hollows, echoing in tint the winter-flowering witch-hazel; wands of glistening willow outlined the waterways, and the red glow of life lay upon the swamp maples; but only the eyes of the wise might hope to find the hiding-places of the white and rathe blue hepaticas, or the nooks deep in the hemlock woods where the wax-pink arbutus distilled fragrance from the leaf mould.
As the sun slowly vanished behind the long chain of hills beyond the Moosatuck, the warmth of the first spring day swiftly followed, and soon the sky was barred with the dull red-purple and citron that promised unwelcome frosts.
In all the countryside but two people were to be seen out-of-doors or in any way seemingly conscious of the evening’s beauty, and these were alien born; Peter Salop, the owner of the pond, mill, and forge, and Ivan Gronski, his hired helper. Peter was English born, a portly and comfortable man of sixty odd, who, having come over in his youth, had made a little money by city trade. Once upon a time he had gone home again to pick up the old life for middle-aged rest, but though the land was there, the people that made the life had vanished. Now coming for the second time, he had settled in our hill country near his sons, and because he was born in a mill, a mill he must own, and, because as a boy he had loved to creep into a neighbour’s forge and watch the molten metal take shape, a forge he must have, even though its work was no more ambitious than turning scrap iron into cheap ploughs and third-grade tools.
Among other traditions that he brought with him and never seemed to have lost in his forty years of city trading, was a love for the sound of cow bells, the sight of sheep grazing on the rough hillsides where they were almost indistinguishable from the rocks, the sight and smell of snowy “May” or Hawthorn, big bushes of which grew in his house yard, a love of lying prone on green grass, hands behind head to watch the sky, and an intense respect for the game laws. It was this latter quality that had begun an intimacy between Peter and Evan, and together they had formed an alliance to put down the trapping, ferreting, and snaring among the hills, about which the country lad, native by a few generations, has no conscience.
Wild geese had been flying these two weeks, and Peter Salop was minded that if a flock dropped to rest and feed on his pond, there should be none lacking in their onward flight. Moreover, with the wild-fowl in mind, he never cut the heavy-seeded marsh grasses and sedges that grew in the pond’s backwater, and had scattered wild rice until it had become naturalized. So now Peter paced up and down the highway that skirted his property on the west, hands behind back, his eyes first resting upon the pond that, here and there, glistened silver-like between the meshed alders that hedged it like coin within a knitted purse, then sweeping the road up which either the mail man or the home-coming cattle might at any time be expected.
For the moment, a flock of white geese held the right of way with half-raised wings and heads erect, forcing their master to one side; for this was before the day of heartless motor cars, when in rural regions, at least, the road belonged to the females, who drove buggies with sundry twitches of the reins as though they were pulling in fish, and to the ducks, geese, and portly hens escorting young chickens.
The other human figure in the picture was working steadily back of the cow barns, occasionally looking across the pond toward the sunset, but without once ceasing his toil of carrying hay from the stack and making ready for milking. What he thought, if he thought at all, left no trace upon his flat features, that were tanned and weathered to the deep hue of sole leather, although his long, light hair, and scant, bristling mustache, showed that originally he must have been fair of skin; his short, thick-set, yet lean body, with its long arms, worked like a machine until one would have supposed that an overseer was standing by him with a lash.
This unceasing labour was a sort of inborn habit, one of the few traditions that Ivan Gronski had brought with him. He never stopped to think why he worked so incessantly. Peter Salop would have told you that Ivan worked but never thought about his work, and in this way he stood in his own light, adding, “By ’n by he’ll get to thinkin’, no doubt, and then he’ll most like not work at all.”
But Peter did not know the reason. Once in the years gone by, Ivan had stopped when he was working, stopped to listen to what another said, that ‘if the tax to support the idle was not so heavy upon them all, there would be more time to raise the head and breathe the air, while if a time should come when there were no idle to be clad in gold and gems, they, the people, might even in work hours stand, hands upon hips, and laugh!’ Then had Ivan not only listened but answered, “God hasten the day,” crossing himself with one hand, while with the other he pressed the little icon, worn under his blouse, against his flesh until it left a mark.
Some one had heard! Swift as the bird flies the words travelled. Nicholas, the man who had spoken, disappeared from among his fellows who worked in a nobleman’s field, while the man who had merely answered soon felt the dreaded spy shadow hovering over him, following him and blighting the way before.
In Ivan’s hut there were five: Maria the wife, Zetta the eldest girl, ’Tiana (short for Tatiana) who crept about, and Paul the baby, and over them all the spy shadow hung. Some day, Ivan had hoped they might all go overseas to America, where it was said that one might not only laugh, but own land and houses; perhaps this might happen when Paul also could walk. But all that was before the spy shadow fell. A little money had been saved and hidden beneath the thatch, but the shadow seemed to shut a door between Ivan and freedom of motion even. What day it would come in the door, he could not tell. Some work horses from the estate were to go for exhibition to a neighbouring fair. When they were ready, polished and sleek, with bunches of ribbons braided in their manes and tails, the man in charge of them fell suddenly ill, and not daring to disarrange his overseer’s plans, he begged Ivan to wear his new boots, blouse, and cap, and ride the horses to the fair. Maria urged him to go, and overlooked the new blouse carefully,—a stitch was lacking here and there, she said,—and had he the eyes for it there was something strange both in her face and her manner of wishing him good-by.
The first night of the fair, amid some little jollity and confusion, an overseer in a village near to Ivan’s pressed close to him and whispered in his ear, “Michael is in Siberia, I, too, am beneath the spy cloud and therefore I go away to-night; come you with me, else it will be too late, to-morrow they mean to arrest us both; keep on moving with the crowd and do not let your face change.”
“How? I cannot, I have no money, and there is Maria and all. You need not think I will do that.”
“Maria knows and wishes it, then she follows when you have made a place. She has sewn the money from the thatch into the blouse you wear.”
Involuntarily Ivan pressed his hand to his side where something had been chafing him, and there he felt the little box that held their treasure. Without question Maria had placed it there, Maria must know more than he. So Ivan Gronski turned his back upon Russia, hatred of his country being all that remained of it in his heart, for what other heritage is left to an honest Russian Pole!
Three weeks later the two men reached a seaport, after arrest, hunger, and despair, all three in turn, had threatened them; another three weeks, and they stood upon American soil. The brother of Ivan’s rescuer, already well established, met and vouched for both; the friend found quick haven, but Ivan drifted here and there at first, working in ditches, on railways, clutching at every penny to save it for the coming of Maria and the others when he had “made a place,” then losing again through sickness, hearing seldom from her, and then always through Michael, the friend with whom he had come.
When working for a junk dealer in Bridgeton, he had been sent one day, in company with another man, out far across country with a load of scrap iron, its destination being Peter Salop’s forge. While his companion bargained about the iron, Ivan had watered the horses and, idle for the moment, stood looking across the pond to where a field of ripening wheat waved to and fro against the blue midsummer sky. He had never set his eyes upon a wheat field since the time when his fellow-worker, in tying sheaves, had spoken of liberty and he had answered. How long ago was that, years or only months? He could hardly tell. And what was that beyond the field edge lying low to the land almost concealed by a tall poplar—was it a peasant’s hut?
No, merely the low-built house of some early settler, the wide stone chimney and sloping attic eaves seeming lowered by the intervening hill. But a throb came into Ivan’s throat and tore it, and suddenly the oppression of his race that had gripped him even in the New Land like a paralysis, gave way, and long-drawn sobs swept him until he swayed and shook like the wheat in the wind.
A heavy but kindly hand was laid on his shoulder. “What’s the matter, my man?” asked the deep voice of Peter Salop. But before Ivan hid his face in his arms, Peter saw the tears and a reserve fell upon him.
“The wheat, the hut, Maria, and I make no place for her,” Ivan explained, piecing out his few words of English with direct gestures.
“Homesick?” shouted Peter; “want to go home?” making the common mistake of thinking loud tones help to interpret a strange tongue. “What are you, a Polack or a Slav?”
Ivan understood, and a sadness deeper than tears came to him, almost giving dignity to his hunched form. “Me? There is no go home for me, I am a Russe!”
Peter Salop might be called dense upon some occasions, but not now. For a moment he too was an immigrant, and that other pond and mill, whose double he had sought in later life in a strange land, were before him.
“I need a farm man, if you’d care to stay about here,” he said presently; “to begin, twenty a month if I board you, thirty and you find yourself; more, bimeby if you fit in.”
“Yeas, yeas, oh yeas,” gasped Ivan, clinging only to the first proposition, which for the moment overshadowed the others.
Ivan stayed; indeed, he seemed rooted to the spot, and this time was now three years past. In the working hours he only worked, but after, he schemed and planned in his little room in the horse barn about the place for Maria, always with the cottage back of the grain field in his mind. Now the plans had taken solid shape and this spring she would come, for did not the letter say so, the letter she had written him at Christmas?—that is, if he had the money ready. This being so, had not the good friend Michael arranged about the passage, and made all safe? For it is not wise for a wife to have much money in the house or write many letters, when the spy shadow has rested on the husband and he has escaped.
The cows came slowly up the road, nipping a green tuft here and there, before turning each to her particular stall. The boy who drove them, a grandson of Peter’s and a namesake as well, gave a whoop of delight as the last one entered the door, and carefully taking a slender trout pole from its resting-place on a beam, he unearthed a bait box from beneath the door stone and sped off through the alders up-stream, to make the most of the hour of twilight, waving his hand to old Peter as he went.
The milking over, Ivan turned the cows into the yard, carried the pails up to the milk-room door, where he received his own small can, then throwing his coat about him as if it were a sleeveless cloak, and raising his head as though lifting the day’s toil from his shoulders, he strolled slowly toward the pond. The evening mail was overdue by this time, and each night he thought might there not be a letter saying when? For surely it was spring now: April the 15th said the Insurance calendar on the barn door. But primitive Ivan had a truer almanac in his head, made up of ice and snow, sun and wind, water, flower colours, and bird songs, though he could not call them by name; for three years this calendar had grouped itself about him and spoken to him in clearer tones than printed figures.
Yes, it was spring in truth and fulness. Twice the marsh frogs had piped up and been stilled again by ice; that was in March. Now they had chanted for fourteen uninterrupted evenings; that meant April. Also yesterday, and the day before that, the straight wild goose arrows had crossed the sky from south to the north-eastward.
The first time in his boyhood that he had seen birds resembling these, in that they looked dark against the sky, an old crone had crossed herself and muttered, “there go the birds of famine.” Here in this land it was otherwise, these birds were the wise prophets, seeing spring from afar. Moreover, best of all the signs, in the field above the pond, the fall wheat had raised its green ribbons far enough to flutter in the breeze that whispered as it ran, “Summer, harvest, bread!”
The twilight began to deepen, and the purple bars locked the horizon against the warmer rays. A mist rose from the pond as high as Ivan’s heart and chilled it. A merry little screech-owl whose quavering call belied its feelings, flapped over to its nest in an abandoned dove-cote.
Suddenly the frogs began to croak, “If she shouldn’t come, suppose they do not come!”
“Maybe that they are dead,” throbbed Ivan’s heart, as though responding in a litany. And why not? The last letter was more than three months back; life had been hard to Maria, she told of work in many places, and in Peasant Russia winter is a demon who travels with famine for horses and wolves for his hunting pack!
There was a harsh bird cry in the distance. Far overhead, a second, nearer, clear and sonorous, then a dark arrow clove the dusk, fell swiftly, broke into feathered fragments, as with some little manœuvring and splashing, the wild-goose flock settled upon the forge pond. Then the pendulum of hope swung back toward Ivan. At the same time, the postman’s white-topped wagon with its sliding door stopped at the four corners. Peter Salop, preparatory to his evening gossip, shuffled his mail deftly in his big hands as one who had been in the haste of commercial life, at the same time giving a whistle and then calling, “Hi, Ivan, are you there? Here’s a letter, aRoosianletter,” he added, as the man came forward, half eager, half reluctant with dread. Then as he saw the cramped, thin writing by the light of the carrier’s lantern, Ivan’s face relaxed. No, Maria was not dead, she could write her own letters to him,—a proud distinction. Content with this, he put the letter inside his shirt, gave a silent good-night greeting to his employer, and balancing his little can of milk carefully, hurried along the Lonetown cross-road that wound toward the north between forge and farm.
For half a mile he kept on the road that twisted and circled until he reached a crudely fashioned gate in the loosely piled stone fence; opening it, he went up a straight dirt path edged with bits of stone to the door of a small house, took a key from his pocket, and let himself in.
Going into the furthest of the three rooms into which the first floor was divided, he lighted a lamp that stood on the uncovered pine table, and drawing up a stool, laid the letter before him, scanned it carefully and then jumped up again. No, he would feed the fowls first, else it would be too dark, bring in his water, fix fire and teapot, make all snug,—then for the letter. What was Ivan doing in this little house, and whose house was it? His own, as well as the five acres of rough land that lay about it.
Two kinds of people traverse the country nowadays, reviving the dead and dying farms: the idealists with money (more or less) in pocket, seeking to find homes on the old lines wherein to spend it; the immigrant looking for a foothold where he may wrest a living from soil whereon the native would starve.
The house, with its three rooms and loft above, was the ruin clinging about its stone chimney that Ivan had spied across the corn field that summer day three years before, one of a dozen such lonely places that had fallen to the town for taxes. Year after year no one had come to pay, and all had fallen away but chimney and stout oak frame.
From the moment Ivan had seen its veiled outlines across the wheat field, he had desired it. At first he only thought of it, and walked around it silently on Sunday afternoons. In a few months his tongue loosened to Peter Salop, “Could the place be bought?” “Yes, surely, for the price of the rough land.” So before the second summer came he owned it.
Little by little—in the off season when Salop could spare him—board by board had he floored it and closed it in. Odd windows picked up second-hand had followed, a ladder reached the loft chamber; then came the paint, odd cans bought at an auction, bright blue with red for window-frames and door. Next he made a sort of corral of birch brush woven with wild grapevines in one corner where once had been a barn. This meant a poultry-yard; four posts and some boards thereon back of the house stood for a wood-shed. The old well was cleaned out and a swinging bucket geared above it.
By the third fall, the rough land was broken up and one little corner spaded and made ready for the vegetable garden to come this spring. Spaded and combed and brushed it was as for a flower-bed, this work largely done by the women, being half the secret of how the immigrant can live upon the bit of land the native scorns.
In-doors a few bits of plain furniture, some dishes, pots and pans, and a stove made home; no, one thing more, a little mongrel cur that a year before had followed Ivan from the village, entered the house with him, and on being fed, refused ever after to leave the place, watching all day for his return, and sleeping either on door or hearth-stone, according to the season.
The evening work done, the fire lit and tea made, Ivan broke the edge slowly from the envelope, grasping his icon and muttering a prayer as he did it. Yes, Maria and all were coming, also his young sister. Coming? As the date read they were now on the seas and any day might bring them.
For the first time since the parting, Ivan seemed to realize the meeting, lost his head, and shuffling his feet, danced with joy. Hitherto he had worked always, worked at first without success; now he let himself feel as a man, which he never had done since the spy shadow came between him and the sun. Then he was merely Fear walking; how long ago was it? He could not seem to reckon, but what mattered it now that it was over?
Lamp in hand, he strode through the three rooms and noticed for the first time how many things were lacking, that workmen in the houses on the upper road possessed. What did that matter? In two days another month’s pay would be due, and Maria could go some day to Bridgeton and choose for herself. All that evening he talked to himself and to the cur by turns, telling him how Maria would tend the garden and Zetta the poultry, and by and by, when they were old enough, ’Tiana and Paul would gather both fagots and berries in the big unfenced country by the Ridge.
Next day Ivan was uneasy at his work; a pedler’s wagon passed and he followed it and bought a doll for ’Tiana and a jingling toy for Paul, to give them welcome. The evening mail brought him another letter, this time from the friend Michael in New York. Maria had landed, and, the legal formalities being over, would go by the noon train to the Glen station on the morrow!
Life came to Ivan, and vigour; his stooping shoulders straightened, man’s blood pushed the serf’s blood through his veins. With the letter extended in his hand, he went to Peter Salop, his master, and telling its contents, dared to ask a half holiday that he might be at the station at noon. This was gladly granted, and he strode home on air, the doll and toy in his pocket and a ham, the gift of Mrs. Salop to help him make a feast, swinging over his shoulder. He put the doll and toy on either side of the little mirror on the kitchen shelf, and eating a cold supper, hurried to sleep.
A long two miles separated the Glen station from the forge; a good half hour before train time, Ivan reached it, clad in his best, a bit of myrtle sticking in his buttonhole. As the engine slid up to the narrow platform, he barely had the courage to raise his eyes. A woman got off, then another, and two men, but no Maria, and the train went snorting on its way.
“Another train from New York?” repeated the station master, busy with his trunks and packages. “Oh, there’s another at four.”
For a moment Ivan hesitated, and then turned back toward the forge, stripped off his bits of finery, and tried to lose himself in work. Peter passing by on his way to the village for a wagon that was at the repair shop, guessed what had happened and wisely said nothing. The good-hearted never jar a brimming goblet.
He would not go too early, thought Ivan, and so the second time he reached the station almost as the train pulled in. This time there were many people, chiefly for the Ridge, and he pushed his way among them wildly; but when the little crowd parted and vanished, Maria was not there! “Six-thirty is the last train up to-night, mostly freight, not often passengers,” chirped the agent.
Ivan slunk off behind the station, head down and the old stoop to his shoulders. He had eaten no dinner and his head reeled. Stumbling into the general store close to the station, he bought a hunk of cheese and a small loaf, and going down the road a short way, he climbed up the wooded bank and finding some soft moss, threw himself down and whittling his bread and cheese into mouthfuls, ate from necessity rather than with relish, for all of a sudden he felt strangely and intensely weary. A little nap could do no harm, so coat under head, Ivan fell soddenly asleep, like the wayfarer he had once been.
The six-thirty train came slowly into the Glen station, for it was both long and heavy with freight cars, a single combination passenger and baggage car being at the very end. This same halted far below the station, where the water-tank made a barrier between the railroad ground and the open fields.
Slowly four clumsy, heavy-laden figures in petticoats crawled down the high steps, assisting a little boy in curious trousers, while a good-natured brakeman helped to steady and replace the various bundles that were fastened to head and shoulders. As they huddled together, straightening their garments and belongings, the whistle blew three times shrilly, and the train creaked and moved heavily on.
Is there any stillness more intense than that which closes around the countryside after the bustle of a train has ceased? The evensong of the birds and the peeping frogs only serve to deepen silence from the purely human standpoint.
The heads of the three elder women were covered by kerchiefs, the little girl was bareheaded, and the boy wore an odd cap, but all alike had an expression of fatigue and resigned anxiety. The elder woman must have been pretty once, but her face was lined and thin with toil and poor feeding, while the other woman, of twenty perhaps, was round-eyed and plump.
“Where is he, Maria? Where is Ivan my brother? He leaves us here alone in a strange place at nightfall?” she asked in her foreign tongue. “I can see no houses, it is like a green desert.”
“Perhaps it is Siberia, then!” said the girl of twelve, with a shiver.
“Hush,” said Maria, “thy father has not forgotten us in all these years, he will not now,” but nevertheless dread was creeping over her, and she raised her hands nervously to loose the band that bound the bundle to her forehead.
“I’m hungry and I want to go to sleep,” piped the little boy, and crouching toward him on the bare ground his mother strove to comfort him.
Ivan slept like one dead, until a shrill whistling sound waked him with a start, and reading the time by the shadows that had not only lengthened, but were vanishing, he rolled to his feet, and half slid, half stumbled down to the road, across the head of which the evening train was moving.
Pulling on his coat, he tried to run, but his feet, numb with inaction, refused to do more than walk. Would he ever reach the station?
At last he felt the boards under his feet, but the long platform was empty, and the station master was setting his night light and preparing to leave. “No, there had been no passengers on the evening train,” he answered curtly, wondering if this wild-eyed man who had been there thrice in one day was a bit out of his head.
For the third time Ivan was about to turn away, when something fluttering far down by the water-tank caught his eye, and as he stared the forlorn group came into view, walking slowly up the track. Another moment, suspense was over, and they stood facing one another.
“Maria and all.”
“Ivan.”
Then at last the women began to cry softly, and Ivan with wet cheeks ran from one to the other, untying the burdens that bound head and throat, and that never more should choke them.
Halting suddenly, Ivan gasped, “But where is Paul, my baby?”
Then Maria laughed in earnest. “This is Paul, a well-grown boy; he has not been a baby these seven years. Have you lost count of time, Ivan, my friend?”
And truly, he had, and flushed when he thought of the little one he had expected to fondle, and the jingling toy at home, and with the knowledge came a certain tinge of disappointment.
Then was the procession formed for the homeward march, Ivan heaped high with the bedding; but they had gone but a few yards when a team, rumbling up from behind, came to a halt, and a jolly voice called, “Hi, Ivan, I think your people had better have a ride.”
Turning, he saw Peter Salop, who was driving his ice wagon, newly painted, with white canopy, red wheels, and blue body, home from the shop.
“It is the master,” Ivan whispered, and the group stood with bent heads, hardly daring to look at the magnificence.
Climbing in, the children’s tongues loosened among themselves. “At home, the master flogs us with a whip, sometimes, if he meets us on the roads,” murmured ’Tiana, “but here in this new country he takes us to ride in his beautiful chariot.”
Once at the house, Ivan and Maria wandered through the rooms, hand in hand, smiling shyly, and then laughing with pleasure. As Maria stopped before the little mirror to unwrap her head and set the hair-pins, Ivan snatched up the jingling toy and thrust it in the mantel closet, for somehow it wounded him to think of his mistake. But Maria cautioned him not to break it, saying: “It may be useful yet, who knows? Ah, who knows anything?”
Then leading her about the yard, her eyes rested on the sprouting wheat field and again tears filled them. “What is it that speaks, Ivan, my friend?” she asked.
“Something we have left behind and wish to forget,” he answered shortly.
“Yes, but what we are glad to leave, we are more glad to find here before us,” and she laid her face against his, which was also wet, but smiling; and high above their heads shot a wild goose arrow.
“What is that?” asked Maria, pointing.
“It is a sign of spring, and a good omen of birds,” Ivan answered.
VTREE OF LIFE
MAY—THE PLANTING MOON
MAY—THE PLANTING MOON
One day, Evan and I playedmake believeand went a-Maying. This was not very long ago, yet in those days, high-road and byways were divided between horse and man only and therefore were our own, while we jogged along plucking at the branches and trailers that we passed, letting the horses browse, reins upon neck without risk of danger.
Themake believewas that we were a couple of carefree children playing at going on a journey to seek the Tree of Life, which, should we chance to find in blossom and walk in its shadow, would enable us to live as long as we wished. This had been one of my childhood’s plays, a hybrid born of Genesis and Pilgrim’s Progress, belonging to days spent alone in the garden when father had gone a day’s journey to see some patients over the hills, and Aunt Lot was immersed in preserves and forgot me. Blissful forgetfulness of children by their elders that is one of the gates to wonderland!
We took the idea as a motive formake believe, and if one plays at being a child, one must complete the game, turn loose the overworked horses of every day, Proof and Reason, and harness in their places Instinct and Belief, steeds who may be trusted to know the straightest road to happiness. As to the Maying part, that is a play also, and, at least in the New England country, a game of chance if you do not know the moves, but an ecstasy if the combinations fall right.
The Red Men waited for the May Moon to wax full and the truce flowers of the white dogwood to signal frost’s surrender from the wood edges before they planted their maize. We wait for the first blooming of an apple tree to tell us that the springtide is at its height. Not one of the opulent, well-fed orchard trees, having all the advantages of a protected location, but a wayside, ungrafted scion of the old orchard standing alone in a field, on the north side of the spruce wind break. We called this tree “the Messenger.” It is the bearer of inconsequent fruit akin to the wild, but in May it is garlanded with firm-fleshed, deep rose-hued blossoms. When this tree opens its buds, we know that its kindred of the hill country will also be decked, and it is our time to go forth, for here the Maying is the festival of the Apple Blossoms, and the blushing snow of it veils the grim gray hills, and brocades the silken emerald of the grassy lowlands every May as completely as the gold and purple of golden-rod and aster mantle the land in autumn.
People make journeys to the Orient to see the Festival of Fruit Blossoms, where many of the trees enclosed in gardens are shown with suggestion both of art and artifice; all this is deemed wonderful because it is far away. Distance promises change, and change is seemingly the key-note of current life. Perpetuity was the ambition of our forbears, else we should not be here. Yet when the near-by holds a Festival of Apple Blossoms reaching from our doors to the horizon line that travels before us, when we try to reach it, do we make a national event of it? Who goes out? Who sees? The reeds shaking in the wind, perhaps; the bluebirds that nest in the hollow tree trunks; the flaming orioles that, grown wanton with spring joy, rifle the honeyed blossoms; but people, where are they? No parties of school children playing in the abandoned orchards, no others sauntering along the highways like ourselves. For the twenty years that we have gone up through the hill country for this Maying, we have never met any others bent upon the same errand. So we call this festival our own, and as we stray along, we conjure up companions from the past to bear us company; the people who planted the orchards that still remain and blossom through all the neglect and moss that Time has dropped upon them.
Each year, though we traverse mainly the same roads, by some fashion we always come upon some place or sign that has before escaped us, though rarely anything that brings past and present together as happened on the day that we playedmake believeand set out to find the Tree of Life.
After we left Oaklands and the Bluffs behind, and dipped into the valley north of Hemlock hill, we began to look for signs and symptoms; for in this country, one can never tell what a winter may bring forth, what tottering chimneys may have collapsed into a stone heap, or piece of primal woodland disappear into the maw of a travelling saw-mill to emerge in form of railway ties. Yes, the overshot water-wheel had disappeared from the Mill in the cedar woods, and the back of the lilac house on the hilltop overlooking the Moosatuck was broken, though the giant lilac bushes that hedged it seemed striving to hide its crippled state.
Here was our first stop. I love to sit on that which was a door-stone; well-sweep on one side, wood-shed on the other, across the road the skeleton of the oak-timbered barn where the rays of sunlight and swallows in intimate kinship, shoot in and out through chinks and knot-holes. Before me, the old orchard sloping downhill to the bush-screened Moosatuck, tall flowering ferns, the cinnamon and royal blending with spreading brakes to hide the tumble-down stone-walls. Then only to close the eyes and think backward, and the people come; only do not think too far. I do not care, even in make believe, for the company of the Indians, the stone heads of whose arrows are scattered through the valley. They were no kin of mine; they left no trace, neither making the world happier or more fruitful.
In the apple orchards runs the blood of our race, the blood of the sweat and toil of our pioneer forefathers; all these old orchards are peopled, for those who have the eyes to see, and so there is no loneliness for us in this silent hill country.
The ancients had it that every child was born under the influence of a particular star; a more spiritual age, that each child has its guardian angel. I have always believed that my particular guardian is a tree, and that one an apple, for this was the first tree that I remember lying under and looking up through the flower-laden branches at the sky, as mother sat upon the round seat that encircled the big trunk, the great fragrant Russian violets growing at her feet.
The first two birds I learned to call by name lived in that apple tree,—a robin who had saddled his untidy nest of mud and straws on a drooping branch, and a pair of purling bluebirds, who lived in a little hole where a broken limb had let in the rain and consequently decay followed,—while my first remembrance of being hurt was when a heavy Baldwin apple fell from the tip-top of the tree and bumped me on the forehead. As I grew up and left dolls behind, my kinship with the tree grew more material,—four apples and a book, to be taken at regular intervals in the depths of the big leather chair in father’s study, being my formula for comfort on a rainy Autumn afternoon.
When we had looked and dreamed our fill, we turned into one of the meandering cross-roads that traverse Lonetown converging toward Pine Ridge, to crawl slowly upward to our watch-tower. This is the place of all others in our haunts for looking down upon the country as if mirrored in a pool or seen as mirage—Tuck Hill in May time, and there is nothing more to be desired! Evan and I crouched on the summit in the shelter of an old tree, still brave with blossoms though the trunk had fallen forward as if on its knees, and gazed our fill.
For days after, I felt the rush of the wind through my hair, for at this spot the wind of the hills meets the breath of the salt-water. Below, two rivers, that give the hill its name, shot their silvery arrows through the overhanging foliage; Tuck being an Indian term for river, as Moosatuck, Aspetuck.
No Druids crowned with oak leaves, or men of myth and marvel, came to us there, such as Puck could conjure from his charmed British hill home; only pictures of the simple settlers who planted their dwellings in the wilderness near ways that are remote even now from the pulse of things. These humble settlers dared and suffered and won out in spirit unconquerable; and though people and homes have vanished without written history, yet God in Nature has made record of them. Far and near throughout the land the festival of Apple Blossoms is celebrating them in the orchards, some still vigorous in age, and others all of gnarled trees that are leaning slowly earthward, as though making ready to fall to final sleep. Again others, young limbed and smooth of bark, unlicensed gypsy scions of the old race, often bitter of fruit, and yet sometimes chancing to bring forth a blend incomparable. These striplings, that wandered from the parent close, had ventured in stony pastures, sought shelter in wood edges, and followed the watercourses, and one and all seemed to whisper to the winds that bore their vital pollen, “Yes, they are all gone who planted us, but we try to shift for ourselves and live forever, for we cannot forget our mother, the Tree that stood in the midst of the First Garden!”
All these things I said half aloud, ending with the query, “Why has no one hereabout planted an orchard for thirty years at least?”
“You are forgetting that we are playing make believe,” muttered Evan, who had been lying so still that I thought he must be trying to ‘hear the grass grow,’ which is the outdoor man’s cover for sleep.
“If we are children, we mustn’t preach or think about why the orchards are running out or why no one plants apple trees,” he continued. “Children never look behind or before, but make a whole lifetime of a single happy day, and it’s because people nowadays are like restless children that they do not plant orchards; what do they care for the future; it seems too long before the fruiting time; they want a quicker crop.”
“Who is talking a sermon?” I cried. “Come down through that lane where we tied the horses; it’s full of dogwood and pinxter flowers; we will fill the chaise and bury ourselves in them; being children, it does not matter if they fade by noon so that we can gather more,” and then we wandered down and on, choosing the pleasantest ways, and letting the horses lead so long as we kept due north, or fancied we did.
“We should cross the Ridge before noon,” said Evan, after we had driven for many miles without keeping track of time. “I wonder if there is a short cut: here is a green lane that runs in the right direction, but it has a gate to it, and may either be a pent road or a private way.” Strangely enough, the old gray horses turned toward the gate, nosed it, and whinnied in unison.
“See the wild fruit trees and bushes that hedge it,” I cried; “apples, cherries, a peach or two, tall blackberries; I wonder if there ever was a garden in this corner? There are all the signs, the lilac bushes, stones that might have been a chimney, and there are new horse tracks in the turf, and colts pasturing yonder in that field. The way is pretty enough to lead to the land of Forbidden Fruit, and we may find the Tree of Life we are looking for at the end. Do let us go in; as we are only children, no one will have the heart to scold us if we should find ourselves in some one’s yard.” So Evan opened the gate, which was made of rough-sawn chestnut boards, and followed rather than led the horses along the way, for the trees closed low above our heads and shut out the distance.
In a glimpse across the fields we saw the tower and broken outlines of a little church.
“That’s not Pine Ridge Church!” exclaimed Evan, stopping short. “The Ridge Church has a pointed steeple, and that is”—“A Christopher Wren box,” I said, the name by which Evan had once designated that particular style of architecture with a tower top that looks like a turned-over table, legs pointing skyward.
“Where are we, Barbara? You were born in this country, not I; this lane seems to be leading us due west, and I’m getting hungry, a natural feeling for a child.”
“I do not know,” I confessed; “there is a place back of Banbury somewhere in this direction called Fool’s Hill because of its cross-purpose roads, where father once had a patient, but I’ve never been there. Wherever we are, we can stop for lunch at the first flat rock that we see.”
Still another sweep of lane and the sound of running water. The horses pricked up their ears and whinnied again, and their call, evidently of interrogation, was answered. Suddenly we emerged from the trees into an open space; a rushing brook crossed the meadow, and was itself crossed by a railed bridge of logs and wide chestnut planks.
“Why didn’t I think to bring my trout pole,” sighed Evan.
“It’s not at all necessary; I can supply a bent pin, and boys always have string in their pockets; while you cut a hickory pole, I will dig for worms with one of these tin spoons; Martha never gives us anything but tin when we go a-Maying.”
Evan looked about as though inclined to accept my offer, and then he stood transfixed, pointing toward a tree on the other side of the river we were preparing to cross; it was a slender white birch that leaned out over the water as if keeping watch, both up and down stream, while its pointed, silver-lined leaves trembled and tittered as it swayed. Halfway up the trunk was a small board that said in unmistakable letters,—“No hunting, fishing, or trespassing—by request of Father Adam.”
I pinched myself to see if I were awake, and I believe that Evan did the same, though he would not acknowledge it. Now, indeed, hadmake believecome true. “Why?” I began, but Evan promptly replied, “Why not?” Hearing a rustling among the bushes, I half expected the bodiless head of the Cheshire cat to appear, but instead there stood a tall man with a strong, smooth-shaven, sunburned face capped with curling white hair, and dark eyes that, though their flash could be seen even across stream, had a genial sort of twinkle at their corners. Save that he was coatless, his clothes were neat almost to precision, even to a clean linen collar turned down over a loose black tie, something unusual in any part of the hill country.
Then Evan spied the man, who stood gazing at us more in amazement than anger. “We were looking for something quite different when we saw your sign,” said Evan, awkwardly, “and now we’ll go away as soon as I can turn the horses.”
“Are you Father Adam?” I asked.
“That is what people call me,” he answered; “and who are you, and what are you trying to find?” This time his gaze took a sweep that included not only ourselves but the horses and the chaise, which we had forgotten was decked like a bower.
“We? Oh, we are only two children out a-Maying,” I said, the spirit of make believe taking complete possession, “and we are searching for the Tree of Life, so that we may pass under its branches and live as long as we choose. Do you know where we might find it?”
“Yes; it grows up yonder in the midst of my orchard. How did I come by it? Ah, that is a story that I only tell those who promise to believe it. Now it is my turn to ask questions,” said Father Adam. “Where did you get those horses?”
“We borrowed them from father, who is Dr. Russell and lives down at Oaklands.”
“So then you arehisdaughter; well, I know that you are telling the truth, for I sold him those gray colts, as they were then, sixteen years ago.”
“They whinnied when we turned in the gate, and rather led us on; can horses remember a place for sixteen years?”
“Yes, and longer if it is the home where they were foaled; but the time has been broken, for the doctor has chanced in every few years.”
Then I began to wonder about this man’s age, who spoke of a few years as if they were but days; was he fifty, or seventy, which?
“Come, let us go up into the cleared land, and I will show you the tree and tell you its story,” said Father Adam, as he took Gray Tom by the bit to lead him, the horse nosing and nibbling at his hand familiarly.
“Is it far?” asked Evan; “because if it is, I think we’d better eat our luncheon first; children always listen better when they’re not hungry.” Something in the tone made Father Adam laugh, and a different expression took possession of his features, as though at first he had doubts as to our entire sanity which were now removed.
“It’s only a few hundred yards, and if those who only pass under the shadow of the tree may have their wish, how much more will happen to those who eat bread beneath it!”
So we two followed him hand in hand, over the bridge and through another bit of lane, and then a vision of peace broke upon our sight,—a green hill sloping upward to a group of elms that shaded a low, rambling house, on one side of which was a bit of garden gay with tulips, bleeding hearts, and columbine, flanked by rows of beehives, tilled fields showing beyond. But it was the right slope that held the eyes; row upon row the apple trees, in first full maturity, made endless aisles into green space—aisles so wide that we traversed them side by side and yet had room to spare.
Then, again, we came upon an open, a square court of grass, and in the centre an apple tree such as I had never seen before,—tall, with two main trunks, high-branched, straight and spreading at the top, elm fashion, half was covered with dazzling white flowers, the other half with pink, after the pattern of a florist’s formal bouquet.
“Sit ye down there,” said Father Adam, “and hear my story. Will I eat with ye? Well, I’ll break a bit of bread for company, for I dined at noon, and it’s now past two.” While he was speaking, the man had slipped the harness from the horses and left them to graze and roll at will.
“Though this was my forbears’ homestead, I was born out in Ohio on a little farm in the Muskingan River Valley. Seventy years ago it was hard living there as far as indoor comforts went, yet all the rich land was free for the tilling, and the corn and wheat flourished, but the thing I first remember about spring was the blooming apple trees. Everybody had them, half a dozen about the dwelling and then an orchard strip, while in almost every settlement there was a space roughly fenced in where young seedling trees were cultivated.
“Who made these apple nurseries, where the settler might get the stock of what was truly the Tree of Life to him, the fruit, food and drink that moistened his bread instead of tears? Was it the pioneers’ own providence? Was it the government? No; it was Johnny Appleseed who planted and cultivated, and the apple trees were his.
“Did you ever hear of the man? Few of your generation have, yet I remember him as I saw him when I was a lad, sixty years ago, and my mother, who was Massachusetts born, numbered him among her distant kin. She said, and she had it from her mother, that he was born in Boston in the year of Paul Revere’s ride; and that his real name was Chapman (the same as my mother’s), John Chapman. He was a studious boy, and wished to be a preacher, having a zealous streak to go overseas and teach the heathen, but what with the war and troubled times, the way was not made straight. Yet the times were fair enough for falling in love, and this he did with one Anice Chase, but while he bestirred himself for the wherewithal to marry, the white plague laid its hands on her. In those days, at the first sign, the victim was set apart as doomed, and so it was with Anice. Only a year from their betrothal, and John journeyed on foot three days out from Boston town to her father’s farm to bid her good-by.
“It was a May afternoon, and the lilacs and apples in the yard were all abloom; Anice on a couch lay under one of those trees, for she would not rest content indoors; the sight and smell of the flowers were all she thought or spoke of. Long they talked together, and then she said so feebly that he could scarcely hear, ‘Go and preach, but not to the far-off heathen. Stay in your own land, but go westward, preach Christ and the Garden of Eden, which is Home, and wherever you go plant the apple, the Tree of Life that stood in the midst of the garden, as its symbol and mine. For I shall reach the garden first and wait for you close to the door.’
“That night Anice died. John Chapman soon after fell ill of a fever, they said from exposure on his homeward journey, and when he recovered, he had strange fancies, and then totally disappeared.
“Soon after the year eighteen hundred, early in spring, and for nearly half a century following, a traveller made his way from western Pennsylvania into Ohio, journeying straight across country to the Indiana border, whether there were houses in his route or not. He was a strange-looking figure, tall, gaunt, and clad in curiously assorted garments, sometimes hatless and barefoot, sometimes wearing mismated shoes and a peaked cap of his own manufacture. Either on his back, or else in a small cart that he dragged after him, he carried a bag filled with apple seeds. Whenever he came to a likely spot, he would loosen the ground with a rude, strong hoe, plant some seeds, weave saplings into a strong enclosure to keep the cattle out, and then pass on. Wild beasts never molested him, the rattlesnakes turned from his path, and the Indians, brutal as they were at that time in their treatment of the settlers, not only never harmed him, but treated him with reverence as a messenger of the Great Spirit.
“Then, when the day was done, he would knock at the door of a cabin, and after partaking of simple food, for which he would always offer to pay, either in coin of which he managed to earn enough to supply his few needs, or else in young apple trees, he would draw close to the lamp or throw himself on the floor by the fire, and pulling a tattered Bible from his shirt, open it and proclaim as one reading a letter, ‘Behold I have planted the Tree of Life at your doors, now hearken to the news fresh from Heaven.’
“To a few of the women, from time to time, he told detached fragments of his history, and my mother being one of these, recognized him almost by intuition as her kinsman John Chapman; and either feeling the distant tie of blood, or because we children gathered about him and hung on his words, he came to our cabin more frequently than to others, for next to his beloved trees, he loved little children and all animals. For women who tried to better his attire or sympathize with him, he had no eyes. ‘I have a wife waiting for me beside the gates of Paradise,’ he would say, ‘and what has she to do but busy her fingers in making me wedding garments, and none but of her making will I wear.’ As to his name, Johnny Appleseed was the only title he was known by in that country.
“Every spring he returned to Pennsylvania for more seed, for which he bartered at the cider mills, and wherever he went his path was strewn with his kind deeds. Did he come across a sick horse left to die by pioneers, it was housed and fed at his expense. Did he meet a traveller more ragged than himself, he always found that he had a garment he could spare, until finally, a feed bag with opening for head and arms was his most common coat.
“One autumn, being lame, he tarried a long while at our cabin; it was the year that I was ten, and word came that the Connecticut home in which my father was born had fallen to him, who, being the youngest, had been obliged to strike out for himself. At first my mother cried, for she had learned to love the free life, hard as it was, and she could not bear the thought of leaving what was nowhometo her; but in Connecticut there were better schools, and mother came of gentle stock, and had planned to make a preacher of me.
“When the day for leaving came, Johnny Appleseed, who had not left the vicinity of our cabin for weeks, appeared beside my mother in the kitchen; in one hand he held a straight young apple tree, securely packed in moss and sacking for the journey, and in the other a leaf from his Bible, the page of Genesis that tells of the Tree of Life.
“ ‘Take them with you, Hannah, and you will not be lonely,’ he said; ‘where the Tree of Life is there is home, and I give you fresh news of it; soon I shall enter forever into the garden where it grows;’ and before she could answer, he had disappeared among the trees.
“My mother brought the apple tree back with her, set it in the midst of her garden, and cherished it as she did her own children; the leaf from Genesis is now in the family Bible, where the record is writ of her own entry into The Garden. Mother would never let the Tree of Life be grafted, for grafting was a thing that Johnny Appleseed discountenanced, and many good varieties came from his seedlings; as it grew, two branches of equal vigour started half a dozen feet above the ground; yet when it came to bloom, one main branch bore white flowers, and the other rose, while the apples of the white flowers were yellow with rosy cheeks, and the fruit of the pink flowers golden russets.
“ ‘See, Adam,’ said my mother, the year that the tree blossomed (she had christened me Adam because I was her first man child), ‘I will call one branch Anice and the other John. What does it signify? That they are united in the Tree of Life.’
“Not many years after, we heard that John Appleseed had come to plant at the house that had once been ours, and after talking cheerfully at supper, spoke of an unusual light that lingered after sunset, and the clouds that were like a door opening in the heavens. After his evening reading, he went to sleep as usual on the floor, leaving the door open, for the night was mild. In the morning they came upon him, the rising sunlight shining on his smiling face, for Anice had been allowed to open the garden door at dawn.”
The bees hummed, and the petals of the apple blossoms fell upon us until Father Adam broke the spell by saying, “It is turning four, and little children should not stay out after dark, for the babes in the wood must have had a cold, damp bed in spite of the robins.”
So we thanked him, wishing to ask many questions that we could not, and pulling the faded blossoms from the chaise, took the flower branches from the Tree of Life that he gave us together with a jar of honey, and turning the way he pointed, up past the house, to the high-road, the grays, old as they were, trotted gaily home.
Then I told father. “Yes,” he answered, “I know where you have been, to Adam Kelby’s farm. A Methodist preacher of power, also a farmer and raiser of fine stock, called Father by the hill people, because that’s what he is to them one and all, never straying far from home. He was born out in Ohio, and believes strange things about apple trees, and holds them sacred, as the Druids did the oaks, some people say. Well, so do I!” As for Johnny Appleseed, he was an actual being who lived and toiled much as Adam has said.
We could not stay indoors that night, but sat on the back steps and supped with the dogs, eating buttered bread in great slabs, with honey to boot. Feasting slowly and dreamily, as pleases children who have been out all day, and between whose mouthfuls the Sandman is beckoning.
As I finished my last bit, assisted by Lark, who has a sweet tooth, I said half to myself, “We’ve certainly been a-Maying, but I wonder did we playmake believe, or are we really children who have found the Tree of Life.” Evan echoed, “I wonder,” and straightway spread more honey on his bread.