OCTOBER ROSES AND A YOUNG GIRL'S FACE
The undertaker was certainly right about the road. I think he must have
had a flash of poetic insight into our taste in roads. This was not, as a
rule, understood by the friendly country folk. Their ideas and ours as to
what constituted a good road differed beyond the possibility of
harmonizing. When they said that a road was good they meant that it was
straight, level, and businesslike. When they said that a road was bad
they meant that it was rugged, rambling and picturesque. So, to their
bewilderment, whenever we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always
chose the bad. And, to get at what we really wanted, we learned to
inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That we knew
would be the road for us. From their point of view, the road we were on
was as bad as could be; but, as I said, the undertaker evidently
understood us, and had sent us into a region of whimsically sudden hills
and rock and wooded wilderness, a swart country of lonely, rugged
uplands, with but a solitary house here and there for miles. It was
resting at the top of one of these hard-won acclivities that we came
upon--and remember that it was the middle of October--two wild roses
blooming by the roadside. This seems a fact worthy the attention of
botanical societies, and I still have the roses pressed for the
inspection of the learned between the pages of my travelling copy of Hans
Andersen's "Fairy Tales."
A fact additionally curious was that the bush on which the flowers grew
seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in
vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an
uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and
hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those
frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in
the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had
these two been chosen, still, so late in the year, to hold up the
tattered standard of Summer?
_Why, in the empty Autumn woods,
And all the loss and end of things,
Does one leaf linger on the tree;
Why is it only one bird sings?
And why, across the aching field,
Does one lone cricket chirrup on;
Why one surviving butterfly,
With all its bright companions gone?
And why, when faces all about
Whiten and wither hour by hour,
Does one old face bloom on so sweet,
As young as when it was a flower_?
The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the
road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house
to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been
left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty
schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States.
Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying
geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to
concentrate in a murmuring hush, like a shell. A little boy sat by
himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the
studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the
great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of
the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside. Here was another rose
blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring
reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood. How had she come there, that
beautiful child-woman in the solitude? By what caprice of the strange law
of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this
particular waste place of the earth?--for her face had surely come a long
way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of
old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful
things. Could she be a plain farmer's daughter, indigenous to that
stubborn soil? No, surely she was not that, and yet--how had she come to
be there? But these were questions we could not put to the schoolmarm.
We could only ask our road, and the prosaic possibilities of lunch in the
neighbourhood, and go on our way. Nor could I press that rose among the
pages of my book--but, as I write, I wonder if it is still making sweet
that desolate spot, and still studying irrelevant geography in the
silence of the hills.
However, we did learn something about our young human rose at a farmhouse
a mile or so farther on. While a motherly housewife prepared us some
lunch, all a-bustle with expectancy of an imminent inroad of harvesters
due to thresh the corn, and liable to eat all before them, a sprightly
young daughter, who attended the same school, and whom we had told about
our call at the schoolhouse, entertained us with girlish gossip of the
neighbourhood. So we learned that our fancies had not been so far wrong,
but that our beautiful young face had indeed come from as far as France,
the orphaned child of a French sailor and an English mother, come over
the seas for a home with a farmer uncle near by. Strange are the
destinies of beautiful faces. All the way from France to Pine Creek! Poor
little world-wandered rose!
And while we ate our lunch, the mother had a sad, beautiful story of a
dead son and a mother's tears to tell us, too sacred to tell again. How
many beautiful faces there are hidden about the world, and how many
beautiful sad stories hidden in the broken hearts of mothers!