THE OLD LADY OF THE WALNUTS AND OTHERS
What manner of men we were and what our business was, thus wandering
along the highroads with packs on our backs and stout sticks in our
hands, was matter for no little speculation, and even suspicion, to the
rural mind. We did not seem to fit in with any familiar classification of
vagabond. We might be peddlers, or we might be "hoboes," but there was a
disquieting uncertainty about us, and we felt it necessary occasionally
to make reassuring explanations. Once or twice we found no opportunity to
do this, as, for instance, one sinister, darksome evening, we stood in
hesitation at a puzzling cross-road--near Dansville, I think--and awaited
the coming of an approaching buggy from which to ask the way. It was
driven by two ladies, who, on our making a signal of distress to them,
immediately whipped up with evident alarm, and disappeared in a flash.
Dear things! they evidently anticipated a hold-up, and no doubt arrived
home with a breathless tale of two suspicious-looking characters hanging
about the neighbourhood.
On another occasion, we had been seated awhile under a walnut tree
growing near a farm, and scattering its fruitage half across the
highroad. Colin had been anointing his suffering foot, and, as I told
him, looked strongly reminiscent of a certain famous corn-cure
advertisement. Meanwhile, I had been once more quoting Virgil: "The
walnut in the woodland attires herself in wealth of blossom and bends
with scented boughs," when there approached with slow step an old,
white-haired lady, at once gentle and severe in appearance, accompanied
by a younger lady. When they had arrived in front of us, the old lady in
measured tones of sorrow rather than anger, said: "We rather needed those
walnuts--" Dear soul! she evidently thought that we had been filling
our knapsacks with her nuts, and it took some little astonished
expostulation on our part to convince her that we hadn't. This affront
seemed to sink no little into Colin's sensitive Latin soul--and they were
public enough walnuts, anyway, scattered, as they were, across the public
road! But Colin couldn't get over it for some time, and I suspected that
he was the more sensitive from his recently--owing, doubtless, to his
distinguished Gallic appearance--having been profanely greeted by some
irreverent boys with the word "Spaghetti!" However, there was balm for
our wounded feelings a little farther along the road, when a
companionable old farmer greeted us with:
"Well, boys! out for a walk? It's easy seeing you're no tramps."
Colin's expression was a study in gratitude. The farmer was a fine,
soldierly old fellow, who told me that he was half English, too, on his
father's side.
"But my mother," he added, "was a good blue-bellied Yankee."
We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before
we left him; and we also learned from him valuable information as to the
possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely
district with no inns, and it was Sunday.
In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaically paying our way for bed
and board as we fared along we fell short of the Arcadian theory of
walking-tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll
of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and
sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks or hedgesides. Now, sleeping out of
doors in October, if you have ever tried it, is a very different thing
from sleeping out of doors in June, and as for rural hospitality--well,
if you are of a sensitive constitution you shrink from obtruding
yourself, an alien apparition, upon the embarrassed and embarrassing
rural domesticities. Besides, to be quite honest, rural table-talk,
except in Mr. Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least,
lacking in variety. Indeed, if the truth must be told, the conversation
of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very
occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it
will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some
long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I
have thought that Gray's famous line should really have been
written--"the long and tedious annals of the poor."
But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I
write that--memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and
dignified. Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we
came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard.
"Missus," he called to the house a few yards away, "can you find any
lunch for two good-looking fellows here?"
The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in
the affirmative. As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and
said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin-pie, cheese and
tea we were about to receive; and the unexpected old-fashioned rite, too
seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and
impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss
of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more. Thus this simple
farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of
time. Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of
the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the
saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that
mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer
find any recognition in our daily routine: _Above all, worship thou the
gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings_.
Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our
memories. We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee,
our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and
water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills. On our left hand,
parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a
grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the
surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown
gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations. So the
old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in
the lonelier country districts of England. We were curious as to the
meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that
remained of the old Genesee Canal. Thirty years ago, this moat had
brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between
Dansville and Rochester. But the old order had changed, and a day had
come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the
surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the
wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat. Only thirty years ago--yet
to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the
hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound
of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.
This old fosse seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten, out-of-the-world
note of the surrounding country. Picturesque to the eye, with bounteous
green prospects and smooth, smiling hills, it was not, we were told, as
prosperous as it looked. For some vague reason, the tides of agricultural
prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit vale. A handsome old
trapper, who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across
the green flats, set down the cause to the passing of the canal. Ah, yes!
it was possible for him, thirty years ago, to make the trip to Rochester
and back by the canal, and bring home a good ten dollars; but now--well,
every one in the valley was poor, except the man whose beehives we had
seen on the hillside half-a-mile back. He had made no less than a
thousand dollars out of his honey this last season. He was an old
bachelor, too, like himself. There were no less than five bachelors in
the valley--five old men without a woman to look after them.
"--or bother them," the old chap added humorously, relighting his pipe.
Mrs. Mulligan, half a mile farther up the valley, was the only woman
thereabouts; and she, by the way, would give us some lunch. We could say
that he had sent us.
So we left the old trapper to his pipe and his memories, and went in
search of Mrs. Mulligan. Presently a poor little house high up on the
hillside caught our eye, and we made toward it. As we were nearing the
door, a dog, evidently not liking our packs, sprang out at us, and from
down below in the marshy flats floated the voice of a man calling to us.
"Get out o' that!" hailed the voice. "There's nothing there for you."
Poor Colin! We were evidently taken for tramps once more.
However, undaunted by this reception, we reached the cottage door, and at
our knock appeared a very old, but evidently vigorous, woman.
"Is this Mrs. Mulligan's house?"
Her name on the lips of two strangers brought a surprised smile to her
face--a pleasant feeling of importance, even notoriety, no doubt--and she
speedily made us welcome, and, with many apologies, set before us the
cold remains of lunch which had been over an hour or two ago--cold
squash, pumpkin pie, cheese and milk. It was too bad we were late, for
they had had a chicken for dinner, and had sent the remains of it to a
friend down the road,--our trapper, no doubt,--and if the fire hadn't
gone out she would have made us some tea. Now, cold squash is not exactly
an inflammatory diet, but we liked the old lady so much, she had such a
pleasant, motherly way with her, and such an entertaining, wise and even
witty tongue, that we decided that cold squash, with her as hostess, was
better than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
Presently the door opened and the good man entered, he who had called to
us from the marsh--a tall, emaciated old man, piteously thin, and old,
and work-weary to look on, but with a keen, bright eye in his head, and
something of a proud air about his ancient figure. It seemed cruel to
think of his old bones having still to go on working, but our two old
people, who seemed pathetically fond of each other, were evidently very
poor, like the rest of the valley. The old man excused himself for his
salutation of us--but there were so many dangerous characters about, and
the old folk shook their heads and told of the daring operations of
mysterious robbers in the neighbourhood. In their estimation, the times
were generally unsafe, and lawless characters rife in the land. We looked
around at the pathetic poverty of the place--and wondered why they should
disquiet themselves. Poor souls! there was little left to rob them of,
save the fluttering remnants of their mortal breath. But, poor as they
were, they had their telephone,--a fact that struck us paradoxically in
many a poor cabin as we went along. Yes! had they a mind, they could
call up the White House, that instant, or the Waldorf-Astoria.
We spoke of our old trapper, and the old lady smiled.
"Those are his socks I've been darning for him," she said. So the cynical
old bachelor was taken care of by the good angel, woman, after all!
Trapping was about all there was to do now in the valley, she said. A
mink brought seven dollars, a musk-rat thirty cents. Our old bachelor had
made as much as eighteen dollars in two days--one day several years ago.
The old man had told us this himself. It was evidently quite a piece of
history in the valley, quite a local legend.