It was the second summer of that university stretch of existence. I
was nineteen. When I returned, that June, to Restwell,
acquaintances, meeting me, said: "You've grown. You are a man!"
Whitechurch, too, they said, was grown. I saw the new buildings, but
yet Whitechurch seemed shrunken. It occurred to me for the first
time that it was a village.... Gamaliel was not there. He had never
come to the university nor returned to his father's way of thinking.
A year past he had gone to Baltimore, Mr. Gilbert, to my thinking,
secretly helping him. There he was drug clerk, in a larger pharmacy
than could be found in Whitechurch. He clerked, he studied. Out of
his letters, which came once a month, I might piece a curious, keen,
absorbed life. I talked of him with Mr. Gilbert, the quaint, silent,
big-eyed druggist.
"He's an observer, a thinker, and a feeler, in about equal parts,"
said Mr. Gilbert. "He won't go off in a dream, either! He'll get up
and act. He doesn't fancy; he imagines. You've got imagination,
too, Michael. What always interests me is a person strong enough to
occupy his imaginations--move in, so to speak!"
At Restwell we managed, this summer, to retain the services of Wilson
Reynolds. He freed me for a wider social life. I went to parties.
I spent hours at Beechwood and Mt. Pleasant, where bloomed young male
and female Byrds and Corbins. I went to see Whitechurch young
ladies. I dressed very carefully for church, having first thoroughly
groomed Boreas, upon whom I rode beside the carriage where sat my
grandfather, my mother, and Aunt Sarah.
And in August I went to Flowerfield.
Flowerfield was filled and gay this summer. John had brought Phillip
Garrett home with him. Aunt Harriet, sparing a month from the White
Sulphur, was here, and with her Dorothea. The Dallases possessed in
full the Southern genius for hospitality. Neighborhood girls and
youths rode in, walked in, at the old, ivy-covered gate. Windows and
doors stood open; you heard the ripple of the piano, chatter,
singing, laughter, the sound of croquet balls. If solitude was
wanted--or if _solitude à deux_ was wanted--you had the oak-grove,
the willowy meadow, the orchard, where the grass grew long and the
trees close and sweet. There was also a lane called from old time
Lovers' Lane.
In mid-August came the tournament--and that belongs to the old South.
You do not meet it any longer, I imagine, in the South that grows out
of the old South.
The Flowerfield county was a debonair county, addicted to social
meetings, an entertained and entertaining county, a county, moreover,
of good horses and good riders. This year, too, was a
young-man-and-woman year. The sun rejoiced, the moon was mild at
night.
From a bouquet of lesser gatherings rises stately the picnic and
tournament to be held at Green Groves, between Flowerfield and the
town. Here spread a field for carriages, and shady, gently sloping
Watteau banks for the assembly that drove or rode or came afoot,
while full before these stretched an ideal course for the mounted
knights. I may say at once that the only tilting was riding at the
ring. Seven poles, seven crosspieces, seven dangling iron rings,
stood at dignified distances. The knights each shook a spear, rode
the course at a gallop, rode in all three times the round, came out
with as many of those rings as might be gleaming the length of the
spear. It was not so extremely easy to gather the fruit!
Town and country, twenty knights entered themselves upon the
marshal's list. Each knight rode for a lady. There would be a
flowery crown for a Queen of Love and Beauty, and lesser chaplets for
three Princesses. The knights chose each their lady, making
application to be her knight.
John must ask Dorothea, she being the guest of his house, though he
wanted, I knew, to ride for Amy Page. But it happened that Dorothea,
who was as imperious as Semiramis, had set her heart upon George
Allen, whom she had seen ride at the White. He did ride and shoot
very well and she thought that he would get the wreath. She gave him
opportunity to ask her, just so soon as the tournament was in the
air, and he took it, under the grape-arbor in the garden. So John,
after all, could ask Amy Page.
I forestalled Phillip Garrett and asked Miriam. She said, "All
right, Michael."
The day of the tournament approached, arrived. It was gay, clear,
bright, dry August weather. The grass was browned, trillions of
insects sang. I was the Knight of the Green Wreath; John, the Knight
of the Mountain, Phillip, the Knight of the Climbing Star. We
carried these devices upon light wooden or pasteboard silvered or
gilded shields. We rode in long boots with spurs, we had sash or
scarf, we had silvered casques or plumed hats. We decked our horses.
We followed to the top of its bent all the bright foolery and dead
earnest of youth.
Green Groves presented a throng. There were there every one you knew
and some you did not know. The brown lists stretched to right and
left. The marshals overpaced them. Beyond was the beechwood where,
pending need of them, the knights' horses were fastened. We did not
go so far in the ways of chivalry as to have squires, though Lewis,
indeed, volunteered to act for any one of the three of us from
Flowerfield.
The day at Green Groves began gaily, went well. The tournament was
for the afternoon.... Afternoon came. The knights withdrew
themselves, repaired to the beechwood and their horses. Youth and
middle age and elder years left the plateau where had been spread the
abundant picnic feast, and came upon the slopes where all might see.
The marshals rode around, making sure that the rings swung right.
They backed their horses to the barrier. Forth rode a herald in a
tabard--Dick Yorke, who knew how to wind a bugle, and had a voice
like that of Stentor. The bugle sounded, Dick made proclamation.
Into the lists paced King Talliaferro, for the nonce the Knight of
the Heart and the Arrow. The youngest women, the girls of seventeen
and eighteen and nineteen and thereabouts, sat in a bright parquet
upon a middle bank, beneath branchy, huge oaks. It was a day of
half-draped, half-princess dresses, of flower-hung, bent, enshadowing
hats. They sat in flowered or delicate-colored muslin, nainsook,
lawn, organdie, dimity, mull. Marian, Miriam, Dorothea, Nancy,
Anne--Amy, Lucy, Nelly, Margaret, Alice--Elizabeth, Judith, Mary, and
Betty--Molly, Carrie, Fanny, Meta, and Hope. They seemed a
flower-garden, they and the rainbow-scarfed knights. There was a
breeze, a murmur, that was like the bees going to and fro. When
Talliaferro rode out there might doubtless have been observed a lift
of Fanny's bosom beneath her rose organdie.... How long and wide and
rich are the vistas of the matter-of-fact!
Well, the tournament! After all, George Allen did not win the
queen's wreath. After all, John won it. Warren Lightfoot won the
first princess's wreath, I the second, Talliaferro the third. We
rode to the Watteau bank and laid the wreaths at the feet of Amy,
Alice, Miriam, Fanny. Fiery blushes, laughter, applause through
Green Groves--flowery speeches by the best speechmakers--good
knights, fair ladies, beauty, devoir! ... Echoes and echoes when the
shell of the ages is held to the ear!
The picnic at Green Groves dissolves away. But that night, at
Flowerfield, we had dancing--fifty young people and a dozen of the
elders to watch, and Jim Dandy, David, and Daniel, the best three
negro fiddlers in the county. Jim Dandy called the figures.
The day was over. The dance was over. I lay in bed--I slept at
last. The next day the house seemed still, resting, reminiscent.
Individuals appeared inclined to go individual ways. I saddled and
mounted Boreas and rode to the great wood by Lost Creek. When I was
deep in the brown shadows I fastened Boreas and went myself and lay
under a beech-tree.
Miriam....
I shut my eyes. Miriam and I were together. There was no
environment. Just Miriam and I together.
All things came into the circle of Miriam and me.... Miriam and all
things came into the circle of me.... Miriam and I and all
things--all persons, all things--dissolved into Being, into Energy,
that with ache and with bliss communed with itself.
Time went by. But I was in a timeless deep world where extreme
motion and extreme rest meet. I thought in no separate, edged
fashion of Miriam. There was a world, and Miriam and I, having
created it, moved within it--Miriam-Michael the name of the god.
The simple, strong delight wavered and frayed down. The light of the
great sun, the warmth of the great body, diminished and diminished.
I came back to separation, to the half-god; farther still to one
Michael Forth in a wood by Lost Creek.... I looked at the sky and
noted the time of day. Presently I left the earth beneath the
beech-tree, and, untying Boreas, mounted him and rode homeward.
But there stayed the glow from the experienced fire.
When I met Miriam at Flowerfield I saw a loved figure--a gate to
Being, Wisdom, and Joy. She and I were two leaves of one gate.
At the end of the week I went home to Restwell, and Miriam and I had
said nothing of any new depths.
At Restwell for the remainder of the summer and the early autumn
there was work enough to do, despite the presence of Wilson Reynolds.
I worked with energy, earning sleep, earning also periods up above
conscious work, when the machine moved exquisitely, when there came
rays from the sun behind the sun.
Between these and the work of the fields fell periods more swiftly
vibrating than the one, less swiftly vibrating (clumsy words we use!)
than the other. In one of these moods I began to versify. I must
express, and so I took a way at hand.
I may have known dimly, for a long while, that it lay at hand. I
could remember Madam Black saying, "You may turn to writing." At the
academy, Doctor Young's class in English Composition had not bored
me. A dance in fetters was still dancing. At the university, "Write
it out!" that I have seen have terrors enough for some minds came to
me with an old familiarity, as of a chord sounding back of the
university and the academy, back of Madam Black, back of childhood
... at any rate, of this childhood.
Now the vast Field of the Emotional potently quickening once again,
potently feeling again the breath of spring, I began again to sing,
for the bird sings in May. Before work, in the dawn, after work when
there was summer night, I wrote down lyrics.
But even so--even then--a stronger mood than alone the lyric began to
repossess me. I came one day to filling out between three lyrics. A
drama in one long act, infantine enough, doubtless, but to my then
eyes poetic, grandiose, and true, came out of my brain and nested in
a quire of foolscap paper. I enjoyed writing it. It was quite true,
as my mother said! Engineering did not confine itself to one species
of material. Driving roads, making connections, leveling mountains,
raising towers, conducting commerce, surveying the Unattempted,
Attempt in mind, appeared a continuous process, in operation upon
more planes than one.