IN WHICH WE CATCH UP WITH SUMMER
Some eminent wayfarers--one peculiarly beloved--have discoursed on the
romantic charm of maps. But they have dwelt chiefly on the suggestiveness
of them before the journey: these unknown names of unknown places, in
types of mysteriously graduated importance--what do they stand for? These
mazy lines, some faint and wayward as a hair, and some straight and
decided as a steel track--whence and whither do they lead? I love the map
best when the journey is done--when I can pore on its lines as into the
lined face of some dear friend with whom I have travelled the years, and
say--here this happened, here that befell! This almost invisible dot is
made of magic rocks and is filled with the song of rapids; this
infinitesimal fraction of "Scale five miles to the inch" is a haunted
valley of purple pine-woods, and the moon rising, and the lonely cry of a
sheep that has lost her little one somewhere in the folds of the hills.
Here, where is no name, stands an old white church with a gilded cross,
among little white houses huddled together under a bluff. In yonder
garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a
clothes-line, and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up on the
hillside almost hidden in the trees.
Even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses, yet
somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the
sanctuary, profanely displayed on a clothes-line. It is as though one
should turn the sacred chalice into a tea-pot. A priest's trousers on a
clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism. But I hope there
were no such fanciful deductive minds in that peaceful hamlet, and that
the faithful there can withstand even so profound a trial of faith. If it
had been my own creed that those vestments represented, I should have
been shaken, I confess; and, as it was, I felt a vague pain of
disillusionment, of an indignity done to the unseen; as, whatever the
creed, living or dead, may be, I always feel in those rooms often
affected by artistic people, furnished with the bric-a-brac of religions,
indeed not their own, but, none the less, once or even now, the living
religions of other people--rooms in which forgotten, or merely foreign,
deities are despitefully used for decoration, and a crucifix and a Buddha
and an African idol alike parts of the artistic furniture. But, no doubt,
it is to consider too curiously to consider so, and the good priest whose
cassock and trousers have occasioned these reflections would smilingly
prick my fancies, after the dialectic manner of his calling, and say that
his trousers on the clothes-line were but a humble reminder to the
faithful how near to the daily life of her children, how human at once as
well as divine, is Mother Church.
A cross, naturally, marks the spot where we saw those priest's trousers
on the line; but there are no crosses for a hundred places of memorable
moments of our journey; they must go without memorial even in this humble
record, and Colin and I must be content to keep wayside shrines for them
in our hearts.
How insignificant, on the map, looks the little stretch of some seventeen
miles from Dansville to Cohocton, yet I feel that one would need to erect
a cathedral to represent the perfect day of golden October wayfaring it
stands for, as on the weather-beaten map spread out before me on my
writing-table, as Colin and I so often spread it out under a tree by some
lonely roadside, I con the place-names that to us "bring a perfume in the
mention." It was a district of quaint, romantic-sounding names, and it
fully justified that fantastic method of choosing our route by the sound
of the names of places, which I confessed to the reader on an earlier
page: Wayland--Patchin's Mills--Blood's Depôt--Cohocton. And to north and
south of our route were names such as Ossian, Stony Brook Glen, Loon
Lake, Rough & Ready, Doly's Corners, and Neil Creek. I confess that there
was a Perkinsville to go through--a beautiful spot, too, for which one
felt that sort of aesthetic pity one feels for a beautiful girl married
to a man, say, of the name of Podgers. Perkinsville! It was as though you
said--the beautiful Mrs. Podgers. But there was consolation in the sound
of Wayland, with its far call to Wayland's smithy and Walter Scott.
And--Cohocton! The name to me had a fine Cromwellian ring; and Blood's
Depôt--what a truculent sound to that!--if you haven't forgotten the
plumed dare-devil cavalier who once made a dash to steal the king's
regalia from the Tower. Again--Loon Lake. Can you imagine two more
lonesome wailing words to make a picture with? But--Cohocton. How oddly
right my absurd instinct had been about that--and, shall we ever forget
the unearthly beauty of the evening which brought us at dark to the
quaint little operatic-looking village, deep and snug among the solemn,
sleeping hills?
The day had been one of those days that come perhaps only in
October--days of rich, languorous sunshine full of a mysterious
contentment, days when the heart says, "My cup runneth over," and happy
tears suddenly well to the eyes, as though from a deep overflowing sense
of the goodness of God. It was really Summer, with the fragrant mists of
Autumn in her hair. It had happened as we had hoped on starting out. We
had caught up with Summer on her way to New York, Summer all her golden
self, though garlanded with wreaths of Autumn, and about her the swinging
censers of burning weeds.
It was a wonderful valley we had caught her in, all rolling purple hills
softly folding and unfolding in one continuous causeway; a narrow valley,
and the hills were high and close and gentle, suggesting protection and
abundance and never-ending peace. Here and there the vivid green of
Winter wheat struck a note of Spring amid all the mauves and ochres of
dying things.
It was a day on which you had no wish to talk,--you were too
happy,--wanted only to wander on and on as in a dream through the mellow
vale--one of those days in which the world seems too good to be true, a
day of which we feel, "This day can never come again." It was like
walking through the Twenty-third Psalm. And, as it closed about us, as we
came to our village at nightfall, and the sunshine, like a sinking lake
of gold, grew softer and softer behind the uplands, the solid world of
rock and tree, and stubble-field and clustered barns, seemed to be
growing pure thought--nothing seemed left of it but spirit; and the hills
had become as the luminous veil of some ineffable temple of the
mysterious dream of the world.
"Puvis de Chavannes!" said Colin to me in a whisper.
And later I tried to say better what I meant in this song:
_Strange, at this still enchanted hour,
How things in daylight hard and rough,
Iron and stone and cruel power,
Turn to such airy, starlit stuff!
Yon mountain, vast as Behemoth,
Seems but a veil of silver breath;
And soundless as a flittering moth,
And gentle as the face of death,
Stands this stern world of rock and tree
Lost in some hushed sidereal dream--
The only living thing a bird,
The only moving thing a stream.
And, strange to think, yon silent star,
So soft and safe amid the spheres--
Could we but see and hear so far--
Is made of thunder, too, and tears._