THE MAN AT DANSVILLE
At Dansville we fell in with a man after our own hearts. Fortunately for
himself and his friends, he is unaware of the simple fact that he is a
poet. We didn't tell him, either--though we longed to. He was standing
outside his prosperous-looking planing-mill, at about half-past eight of
a dreaming October morning. Inside, the saws were making that droning,
sweet-smelling, sawdust noise that made Colin think of "Adam Bede." The
willows and button-wood trees at the back of the workshops were still
smoking with sunlit mist, and the quiet, massive, pretty water looked
like a sleepy mirror, as it softly flooded along to its work on the big,
dripping wheels.
To our left a great hill, all huge and damp, glittering with gossamers,
and smelling of restless yellow leaves, shouldered the morning sky.
Then, turning away from talk with three or four workmen, standing at his
office door, he saluted the two apparitional figures, so oddly passing
along the muddy morning road.
"Out for a walk, boys?" he called.
He was a handsome man of about forty-three, with a romantic scar slashed
down his left cheek, a startling scar that must have meant hideous agony
to him, and yet, here in the end, had made his face beautiful, by the
presence in it of a spiritual conquest.
"How far are you walking?--you are not going so far as my little river
here, I'll bet--"
And then we understood that we were in the presence of romantic
conversation, and we listened with a great gladness.
"Yes! who would think that this little, quiet, mill-race is on her way to
the Gulf of Mexico!"
We looked at the little reeded river, so demure in her morning mists, so
discreet and hushed among her willows, and in our friend's eyes, and by
the magic of his fanciful tongue, we saw her tripping along to dangerous
conjunctions with resounding rock-bedded streams, adventurously taking
hands with swirling, impulsive floods, fragrant with water-flowers and
laden with old forests, and at length, through the strange, starlit
hills, sweeping out into some moonlit estuary of the all-enfolding sea.
"Aren't you glad we walked, Colin?" I said, a mile or two after. "You
are, of course, a great artist; but I don't remember you ever having a
thought quite so fine and romantic as that, do you?"
"How strange it must be," said Colin, after a while, "to have
beauty--beautiful thoughts, beautiful pictures--merely as a recreation;
not as one's business, I mean. And the world is full of people who have
no need to sell their beautiful thoughts!"