His wife's narrative had started a train of thoughts and emotions that
would be henceforth the mainspring of all his acts. Of late the sleeping
ambition that lies in the heart of every man had begun to stir, and he
had dared to think timidly and doubtfully of a time when he should be,
to use his own words, "something and somebody" in the world. As he
listened to the story of Sarah's social adventures, his heart swelled
proudly. His wife had found her place among her fellow women; he would
find his among his fellow men. Before him were the doors of opportunity
all "barred with gold", but he held in his hand the "golden keys" that
would unlock them, and the finger of Divinity was pointing out the way
he should go. Could it be that the Infinite Power had planned his life
for a certain end? That he had come into the world for something more
than daily toil, daily wages, and, at last, old age and death? Were his
mortal days a part of some great, immortal plan? A thrill of awe shook
the man as he caught a momentary vision of the majesty in a human life
that expresses a divine purpose. He had no words for thoughts like
these, and the silence lasted a long time. When he spoke, it was of
practical affairs.
"The club will have to meet with you one of these days, won't it?" he
asked.
"It meets with me the last of the month," said Sarah, trying to speak in
a matter-of-fact way.
David looked critically around the room. "This furniture's pretty
nice," he said, "but I don't know how it compares with other people's."
"The furniture's all right," said Sarah hastily. "Of course, this house
doesn't look like Mrs. Emerson's. Her parlor looked as if everything in
it had grown there and belonged there; this room looks as if we'd just
bought the things and put them here. Maybe after we've lived here a long
time, it'll look different, but there's no use tryin' to make my house
look like Mrs. Emerson's or Mrs. Morton's."
"Are your clothes as good as the other women's?" inquired David
solicitously.
"Suppose they're not," argued Sarah sturdily. "I'm not goin' to try to
dress like other women. My clothes suit me, and that's enough."
Sarah's sturdy independence pleased David, but like a good husband, he
wanted his wife to look as well as other women. "Oughtn't you to have
some jewelry, Sarah? Some rings and chains and--things of that sort?" he
added vaguely.
"David! David!" cried his wife half in anger, half in love. "Do you want
to make me a laughing stock? My hands are not the kind for rings; and
what would Molly and Annie say if they saw me wearin' jewelry? We've
got enough things between us and our old friends without jewelry.
Instead of rings, you can give me a check for the day nursery."
Sarah was rolling up her work now and smiling softly. "Two weeks ago,"
she said, "it seemed as if everything was in a tangle just like this
worsted gets sometimes. But I've picked and pulled and twisted, you
might say, till I've straightened it out. You see, David, there's some
things you can't understand till you get 'way off from them. As long as
I was in this house, I thought I was out of place, but I hadn't been in
the cottage long, till I saw that this house was just as much my home as
the little cottage was. I never could have seen it, though, if I hadn't
gone back to the old house."
Wise Sarah! It was well for her that the club had changed its plan of
work. She would never be able to write an analysis of _The Ring and the
Book_, or throw an interpretative flashlight into the obscurity of _Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country_, but like the knight of the Dark Tower, she
had learned that
"One taste of the old time sets all things right."
ONE DAY IN SPRING
According to the calendar, it was the last day of March, but for weeks
the spirit of April and May had breathed on the face of the earth, and
those who had memories of many springs declared that never before had
there been such weather in the month of March.
In the annals of the rural weather prophets, the winter had been set
down as the coldest ever known--a winter of many snows, of frozen
rivers, and skies so heavily clouded that there was little difference
between the day and the night. Wild creatures had frozen and starved to
death, and man and beast had drawn near to each other in the
companionship of common suffering. Then, as if repenting of her
harshness to her helpless children, Nature had sent a swift and early
spring. It was March, but hardly a March wind had blown. The rain that
fell was not the cold, wind-driven rain of March; it was the warm,
delicate April shower. The sun had the warmth of May, and all the
flowers of field, forest, and garden had felt the summons of sun and
rain and started up from the underworld in such haste that they trod on
each other's heels. Flowers that never had met before stood side by side
and looked wonderingly at each other. The golden flame of the daffodils
was almost burnt out, and the withered blossoms drooped in the grass
like extinguished torches; but hyacinths were opening their censers;
tulips were budding; the plumes of the lilacs showed color, and
honeysuckles and roses looked as if they were trying to bloom with the
lilac and the snowball. March had blustered in with the face and voice
of February, but she was going out a flower-decked Queen of May.
The fragrant air was like the touch of a warm hand. Fleets of white
clouds sailed on the sea of pale blue ether, and the trees, not yet in
full leaf, cast delicate shadows on the grass. On a day like this in
ancient Rome, young and old clad themselves in garments of joy and went
forth to the festival of the goddess of grain and harvests; and under
such skies, English poets were wont to sing of skylarks and of golden
daffodils. But in the calendar of the Kentucky housewife there is no
Floralia or Thesmophoria, and no smile or breath of song was on the lips
of the girl who was climbing the back stairs of an old farmhouse, with
a bucket of water in one hand and a cake of soap in the other, to
celebrate the Christian festival of spring cleaning. The steps were
steep and narrow, and every time she set her foot down they creaked
dismally, as if to warn the climber that they might fall at any minute.
She toiled painfully up and set the bucket on the floor. Where should
she begin her work? She went into the nearest bedroom, opened the door
of a closet, and looked disgustedly at the disorder within,--coats,
hats, trousers, disabled suspenders, a pair of shoes caked with mud, an
old whip-handle, an empty blacking box, a fishing-pole and tangled line,
a hammer, and a box of rusty nails. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She
had cleaned the boys' closet and the boys' room every spring for--how
many years? It made her tired to think of it, and she sat down on the
edge of the slovenly bed and stared hopelessly around the low-ceiled,
dingy room. The mouldy wall paper was peeling off, the woodwork was an
ugly brown, dirty, discolored, and worn off in spots; the furniture was
rickety, the bedclothes coarse and soiled; and walls, floors, and
furniture reeked with a musty odor as of old age, decay, and death. All
houses that have sheltered many generations acquire this atmosphere;
nothing but fire can wholly destroy such uncleanness, and some vague
idea of the impossibility of making the old house wholesomely clean
crossed the girl's mind as she sat listlessly on the side of the bed and
stared out of the window.
There are two kinds of homesickness. One is a longing for home that
seizes the wanderer and draws him across continent and ocean back to the
country and the house of his nativity. Men have died of this
homesickness on many a foreign soil. The other kind is a sickness of
home that draws us away from ordered rooms, from sheltering walls and
roofs, to the bare, primitive forest life that was ours ages ago. It was
this homesickness that made Miranda sigh and frown as she looked at that
room, gray and dingy with the accumulated dirt of the winter, and
thought of the task before her. While she sat, scowling and rebellious,
a breeze blew in, scattering the sickly odors of the bedroom, and at the
same moment she heard two sounds that seem to belong specially to the
spring of the year, the bleating of some young lambs in a near meadow
and the plaintive lowing of a calf that had been separated from its
mother. Yes, spring was here. How she had longed for it all through the
long, cold, dark days of winter! And now she must spend its sunny hours
in house cleaning! A weariness of all familiar things was upon her; she
hated the old house; she wanted to go,--somewhere, anywhere, and her
soul, like a caged bird, was beating its wings against the bars of
circumstance. She went to the window and leaned out. A branch of a maple
tree growing near the house almost touched her cheek, and she noticed
the lovely shape and color of the young leaves. Farther on was a giant
oak whose orange-green tassels swung gaily in the breeze, and through
the trees she had a glimpse of a green meadow bordered by an osage
orange hedge that looked like a pale green mist in the morning sunshine.
She saw and felt the glory and sweetness of the spring with her physical
senses only, for in her heart there was a "winter of discontent." But
while she leaned from the window, looking at the trees and sky, came one
of those unexplained flashes of consciousness in which the present is
obliterated and we are snatched back to a shadowy past. What was the
incantation that made her feel that she had lived this same moment ages
and ages ago? Was it the voice of the wind and the voice of the bird in
the tree-tops? Was it the shimmer of morning mist and the gold-green
oak tassels against the blue sky? Or was it a blending of all these
sights and sounds? Her gaze wandered farther and farther on till it
reached the horizon line where stretched a fragment of the primitive
wood, bounded by smooth turnpikes and fenced-in fields and meadows.
Serene and majestic these forest remnants stand in every Kentucky
landscape, guardians of the Great Silence, homes for the hunted bird and
beast, and sanctuaries where the stricken soul of man may find a miracle
of healing. A wild, unreasonable longing possessed the homesick girl as
she looked at that line of trees, softly green and faintly veiled, and
thought of what lay in their secret deeps. All her life had been spent
in the country, and yet how many years it had been since she had seen
the woods in spring. _The woods in spring!_ The words were like a strain
of music, and as she whispered them to herself, something rent the veil
between childhood and womanhood, and she saw herself a little girl
roaming through the forest, clinging to her father's hand and searching
for spring's wild flowers. She saw the blue violets nestling at the foot
of mossy stumps, columbines and ferns waving in damp, rocky places,
purple hepaticas, yellow celandine, the pinkish lavender bells of the
cowslip, Solomon's seal lifting its tiers of leaves by lichened rocks
around a dripping spring, and that strange white flower, more like the
corpse of a flower than the flower itself, that she had found once--and
then no more--growing by a fallen log and half buried under the drift of
fallen leaves. Suddenly she started up, hurried from the room, and ran
swift-footed down-stairs and into the kitchen, where her mother stood at
a table washing the breakfast dishes.
"Mother," she said breathlessly, "I'm going over to the woods awhile. I
want to see if the violets are in bloom yet. I'll be back after awhile."
Ellen Crawford paused in her work and looked helplessly at her daughter.
The mind of her child had always been a sealed book to her, and she was
never without a feeling of apprehension as to what Miranda would do
next. "For mercy's sake!" she said weakly. Going to the woods to look
for violets in house-cleaning time, when each day's unfinished work
overflowed into the brimming hours of the next day! There were no words
to fit such folly, and the mother only stood stupefied, looking through
the open door at the flying footsteps of her errant daughter.
Miranda ran through the back yard where the house dog lay basking in the
sun, and two broods of young chickens were "peeping" around in the wet
grass, led by their clucking mothers. The cat came purring and tried to
rub herself against Miranda's garments, but she thrust her aside and
hurried on. These creatures belonged to the house, and it was the house
from which she was fleeing. As she passed through the sagging garden
gate, a casual gust of wind stirred the boughs of a water-maple tree
near by, and scattered a shower of petals over her hair and shoulders,
while a robin in the topmost branch sang a Godspeed to the pilgrim who
was hastening to the altars of spring. Down the garden path she sped
with never a glance aside at the trim rows of early vegetables bordered
by clumps of iris and peonies, with now and then an old-fashioned rose
that looked as if it were tired of growing and blooming in the same spot
so many years. If one had stopped her and said: "Where are you going?"
she could not have told him where. If he had asked: "What do you seek?"
again she would have been at a loss for a reply. But she had heard a
call more imperative than the voice of father or mother, more
authoritative than the voice of conscience; something had passed out of
her life with the passing of childhood and first youth; she was going to
find the precious lost joy; and the power that guides the bird in its
autumnal flight to the south and brings it north again was guiding her
feet to the woods in spring.
She pushed aside some loose palings and crept through the opening into
the pasture that lay back of the garden. The cows stopped feeding and
stared at her in mild surprise as she stood, irresolute and wavering,
looking back at the house, where her mother was lifting the burden of
the day's toil, and then at the orchard on one side, where the peach
trees were faintly flushed with pink. In the middle of the pasture stood
a group of elms. When the wind passed over them, their branches swayed
with the grace of willows, and against the blue sky their half-grown
leaves were delicate as the fronds of the maidenhair fern. The elms
seemed to beckon her, and she crossed over and stood for a moment
looking up at the sky "in a net",--the net of leafy branches. While she
gazed upward, a sudden wind came blowing from the direction of the
forest, and on its breath was the mysterious sweetness that is one of
the surest tokens of spring. It is as if every tree and plant of the
forest had sent forth a premonition of its blooming, a spirit perfume
waiting to be embodied in a flower. Miranda drew a long breath and
looked across the meadow to the freshly plowed field whose western
boundary line was "all awave with trees", each clad in its own
particular tint of verdure, from the silver green of the silver poplar
to the black green of the cedars. The dogwood, that white maiden of the
forest, was still in hiding; the wild cherry, that soon would stand like
a bride in her wedding veil, was now just a shy girl in a dress of
virginal green; the purplish pink of the red-bud flower was barely
visible on its spreading limbs. The Great Artist had merely outlined and
touched here and there with his brush the picture which later on he
would fill in with the gorgeous coloring of summer's full leafage and
full flowering.
She hurried across the meadow, climbed the old rail fence, and plodded
her way over the plowed ground, stepping from ridge to ridge and feeling
the earth crumble under her feet at every step. It was a ten-acre field,
and she was out of breath by the time she reached the other side. There
was no fence between field and forest; the only boundary line was the
last furrow made by the plow. On one side of this furrow lay
civilization with its ordered life of cares and duties. On the other
side was the wild, free life of Nature. She stopped and looked
doubtfully into the sunlit aisles of the forest, as we look at old
familiar places, revisited after long absence, to see if they measure up
to the stately beauty with which our childish imagination clothed them.
She stepped timidly through the underbrush at the edge of the wood and
looked above and around. So many years had passed, and so many things
had passed with the years! Perhaps the remembered enchantment had passed
too. She recalled the song of the birds, and how the voice of the wind
in the tree-tops had sounded against the fathomless stillness that lies
at the heart of the forest. She held her breath and listened. Wind and
leaf and bird were making music together as of old; and under the
whisper and the song she felt the presence of the eternal, inviolable
calm against which earth's clamor vainly beats. She recalled the rustle
of the dead leaves under her feet, and the odor that the heat of the sun
drew from the moist earth. There were dead leaves to-day in every path,
and Nature was distilling the same perfumes and making beauty from ashes
by the same wondrous alchemy she had used when the earth was young.
Nothing had changed except herself. She looked around for an opening in
the underbrush, some trace of a path, and then hastened fearlessly on to
find the main path that led through the heart of the woods, and made a
"short cut" for the traveler on foot. Besides this central path, there
were numerous little by-paths made by the feet of cattle that had
pastured here for a few months of the previous summer. Each one of these
invited her feet, and each one led past some fairy spot--a bed of
flowers, a bower of wild vines, a grapevine swing, a tiny spring from
which she drank, using a big, mossy acorn cup for a goblet. She wandered
from one side of the main path to the other, and thrice she walked from
road to road. All winter she had been snow-bound and ice-bound within
the walls of the old farmhouse, and now spring had unlocked the doors of
the prison. Lighter grew her footsteps the longer she walked, and in
every muscle she felt the joy of motion that the fawn feels when it
leaps through the forest, or the bird when it cleaves the sunny air on
glistening wing.
Gone was the thought of time, for here were no tasks to be done, no
breakfast, dinner, and supper; and the day had but three
periods,--sunrise, noontide, and sunset. The house she had left that
morning seemed a long way off, almost in another world; and the forest
was an enchanted land where there was no ugly toil for one's daily
bread. Duty and fear alike were lulled to sleep, and while the sun
climbed to its zenith she roamed as care-free as any wild creature of
the woods. Suddenly a cloud darkened the sun and melted into a soft,
warm mist that the wind caught up and blew like a veil across the face
of spring. Miranda paused, lifted her head, and held out her hands to
catch the gracious baptism. It was only a momentary shower, past in a
burst of sunshine, but it left its chrism on her forehead and hair and
made her feel more akin to flower and tree. How many gifts were falling
from the hand of spring! To the birds the joy of mating and nesting; to
the roots and seeds in the dark, cold earth warmth and moisture and a
resurrection morn; and to the ancients of the forest a vesture as fresh
as that which clothes the sapling of the spring.
Surely we have severed some tie that once bound us to the Great Mother's
heart or this outflow and inflow of life and beauty that we call spring
would touch men and women too, and then would come the Golden Age.
Nature is kinder to her trees and flowers than she is to her sons and
daughters. The girl who lifted her forehead to the sacrament of the rain
should have received a blessing that would touch her face with the color
of the rose and put the strength and grace of the young trees into her
limbs. But how sad and strange she looked, flitting through the vernal
freshness of the forest! Her faded calico gown hung limp over her thin
body, and her hair and cheek were as faded as the gown. She should have
been a nymph, but she was only a tired, worn daughter of the soil, and
amid all this opulence of giving there was no gift for her except the
ecstatic yearning that was welling up in her heart and leading her here
and there in search of something she could not name.
How sweet the air was! She breathed deeply as she walked, and at every
inspiration a burden seemed to fall from both body and soul. Just to be
alive was good--to breathe, to walk through the sun-flecked forest
paths, to feel the warmth of the sunshine on her shoulders, and to know
that the world of the forest belonged to her as it belonged to the bird
and the bee. She had almost reached the other side of the strip of
woodland, and through the trees she caught glimpses of a wheat field
stretching like a pale green sea from this strip of woodland to another
that belonged to a neighboring farm. She thought of a hymn her mother
often sang when the drudgery of the farm permitted her soul to rise on
the wings of song:
"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between."
She lifted up her voice and sang the old hymn:
"There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
"There everlasting spring abides
And never withering flowers:
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This pleasant land from ours."
Alas! How strange and sad it sounded with the "careless rapture" of the
birds. Never before had a song of death been sung in those forest
aisles, and suddenly she stopped, silenced by a sense of the incongruity
of such a hymn in the spring woods. Why should one sing of "sweet
fields" and "pleasant lands" beyond the sea of death? Right here are
pleasant lands and sweet fields, and our songs should be of the "pure
delight" of this old earth. Better than such worship as ours the worship
of the pagan, who went forth with music to meet the dawn and sang hymns
in praise of seed-time and harvest.
It is not alone by "getting and spending" that we "lay waste our powers"
and loosen our hold on the possessions that Nature so freely offers us.
Perpetually she calls to us with her voice of many waters, her winds and
bird songs. She opens and closes each day with cloudy splendors that
transcend the art of poet or painter. She spends centuries making the
columned sanctuaries of her forests more majestic than Solomon's temple,
and lights them with the glory of the sun and stars. Life more abundant
is in her air and sunshine. She offers to each soul the solitude of the
wilderness, and the mountains, where Christ found rest and strength
after the presence of crowds had drained him of his virtue. And we--we
wrap ourselves in the mantle of Care; we build walls of stone to shut
out from us all sweet influences of Nature; we sing of "an everlasting
spring", and then let the fleeting hours of our earthly springs go by
without once tasting their full sweetness; we look for a heaven beyond
death, unmindful of the heaven within and around us; we deem the light
that falls through a stained glass window more religious than the light
of open day, and a waxen taper more sacred than a star; we shorten life
by cutting it off from its source, and at last, worn out with sordid
cares, we give our bodies back to earth without having known one hour of
the real joy of life.
Vague, half-formed thoughts like these were in Miranda's mind as she
paused and looked up in response to a voice from a neighboring oak:
"Chic-o-ree! Chic-o-ree!" The syllables were clear and distinct as if
spoken by a human voice, and from a tree across the path came the
answer: "Chic-o-ree! Chic-o-ree!" All her consciousness had been merged
in seeing, but now she was aware of a chorus of voices calling,
chirping, whistling, trilling, fluting, warbling from far and near, the
orchestra of May assembled a month in advance of its usual time.
"If we could only live outdoors!" she whispered to herself. All the high
emotions that fill the heart of a poet in spring were stirring in the
breast of the country girl, and finding no way of expression they could
only change into poignant longings that she herself but half understood.
There was a puzzled, baffled look on her face as she stood hesitant,
wondering what step to take next. So many remembered things she had
found in the woods!--music, perfume, light winds and warmth and flowers
and trees, but there was still something, nameless, elusive, that had
once been hers, and she must find it before the day ended.
* * * * *