AND UNEXPECTEDLY THE LAST
We had seen the two great rivers sweep into each other's arms in a broad
glory of sunlit water, meeting at the bosky end of a wooded promontory,
and yes! there was the Susquehanna glittering far beneath--the beautiful
name I had so often seen and wondered about, painted on the sides of
giant freight-cars! Yes, there was actually the great legendary river. It
was a very warm, almost sultry noonday, more like midsummer than
mid-October, and the river was almost blinding in its flashing beauty.
Loosening our knapsacks, we called a halt and, leaning over the railing
guarding the precipitous bank, luxuriated in the visionary scene. So
high was the bank, and so broad the river, that we seemed lifted up into
space, and the river, dreamily flowing beneath a gauze veil of heat-mist,
seemed miles below us and drowsily unreal. Its course inshore was dotted
with boulders, in the shadows of which we could see long ghostly fishes
lazily gliding, and a mud-turtle, with a trail of little ones, slowly
moving from rock to rock.
Suddenly Colin put his hand to his head, and swayed toward me, as though
he were about to faint.
"I don't know what's the matter, old man," he said, "but I think I had
better sit down a minute." And he sank by the roadside.
Unlike himself, he had been complaining of fatigue, and had seemed out of
sorts for a day or two, but we had thought nothing of it; and, after
resting a few minutes, he announced himself ready for the road again,
but he looked very pale and walked with evident weariness. As a roadside
cottage came in sight, "I wonder if they could give us a cup of tea," he
said; "that would fix me up, I'm sure." So we knocked, and the door was
opened by a pathetic shadow of an old woman, very poor and thin and
weary-looking, who, although, as we presently learned, she was at the
moment suffering from the recent loss of one eye, made us welcome and
busied herself about tea, with an unselfish kindness that touched our
hearts, and made us reflect on the angelic goodness of human
nature--sometimes.
She looked anxiously, mother-like, at Colin, and persuaded him to lie
down and rest awhile in her little parlour, and, while he rested, she and
I talked and she told me how she had come by her blind eye--an odd,
harmless-sounding cause. She had been looking up into one of her
apple-trees, one day, a few weeks ago, and an apple had fallen and struck
her in the eye. Such innocent means does Nature sometimes use for her
cruel accidents of disease and death! Just an apple falling from a
tree,--and you are blind! A fly stings you, on a Summer day, and you die.
Colin, rested and refreshed, we once more started on our way, but,
bravely as he strode on, there was no disguising it--my blithe,
happy-hearted companion was ill. Of course we both assured the other that
it could be nothing, but privately our hearts sank with a vague fear we
did not speak. At length, after a weary four miles, we reached Towanda.
"I'm afraid," said poor Colin, "I can walk no more to-day. Perhaps a good
night's rest will make me all right." We found an inn, and while Colin
threw himself, wearied, on his bed, I went out, not telling him, and
sought a doctor.
"And you've been walking with this temperature?" said the learned man,
when he had seated himself at Colin's bedside and felt his wrist. "Have
you been drinking much water as you went along? ... H'm--it's been a very
dry Summer, you know."
And the words of our friend in the buggy came back to us with sickening
emphasis. O those innocent-looking fairy wells and magic mirrors by the
road-side! And I thought, too, of the poor old blinded woman and the
falling apple. Was Nature really like that?
And then the wise man's verdict fell on our ears like a doom.
"Take my advice, and don't walk any more, but catch the night train for
New York."
Poor Colin! But there was no appeal.
The end of our trip had come, suddenly, unreasonably, stupidly,
like this.
"So we've got to be shot into New York like a package through a tube,
after all!" said Colin. "No lordly gates of the Hudson for us! What a
fool I feel, to be the one to spoil our trip like this!"
And the tears glistened in our eyes, as we pressed each other's hand in
that dreary inn bedroom, with the shadow of we knew not what for Colin
over us--for our comradeship had been very good, day by day, together on
the open road.
Our train did not go till midnight, so we had a long melancholy evening
before us; but the doctor had given Colin some mysterious potion
containing rest, and presently, as I sat by his side in the gray
twilight, he fell into a deep sleep--a sleep, alas! of fire and wandering
talk. It was pitiful to hear him, poor fellow--living over again in
dreams the road we had travelled, or making pictures of the road he
still dreamed ahead of us. Never before had I realized how entirely his
soul was the soul of a painter--all pictures and colour.
"O my God!" he would suddenly exclaim, "did you ever see such blue in
your life!" and then again, evidently referring to some particularly
attractive effect in the phantasmagoria of his fever, "it's no use--you
must let me stop and have a shot to get that, before it goes."
One place that seemed particularly to haunt him was--Mauch Chunk. He had
been there before, and, as we had walked along, had often talked
enthusiastically of it. "Wait till we get to Mauch Chunk," he said; "then
the real fun will begin." And now, over and over again, he kept making
pictures of Mauch Chunk, till I could have cried.
"Dramatic black rocks," he would murmur, "water rushing from the hills
in every direction--clean-cut, vivid scenery--like theatres--the road
runs by the side of a steel-blue river at the bottom of a chasm, and
there is hardly room for it--the houses cling to the hillside like
swallows' nests--here and there patches of fresh green grass gleam among
the rocks, and, high up in the air on some dizzy ledge, there is a wild
apple-tree in blossom--it is all black rocks and springs and moss and
tumbling water--"
Then again his soul was evidently walking in the Blue Mountains, and
several times he repeated a phrase of mine that had taken his fancy: "And
now for the spacious corridors of the Highlands, and the lordly gates of
the Hudson."
Then he would suddenly half awaken and turn to me, realizing the
truth, and say:
"O our beautiful journey--to end like this!" and fall asleep again.
And once more I fell to thinking of fairy springs by the roadside, and
apples falling innocently from the bough, and how the beautiful journey
we call life might some day suddenly end like this, with half the
beautiful road untravelled--the rest sleep and perchance dreams.
* * * * *
But Colin did not die. He is once more painting out in the sun, and next
year we plan to stand again on that very spot by the Susquehanna, and
watch the shadows of great fishes gliding through the dreamy water, and
the mud-turtle with her trail of little ones moving from rock to
rock--and then we shall strike out on the road again, just where we left
off that October afternoon; but the reader need not be afraid--we shall
not write a book about it.
_ENVOI_
_And now the merry way we took
Is nothing but a printed book;
We would you had been really there,
Out with us in the open air--
For, after all, the best of words
Are but a poor exchange for birds.
Yet if, perchance, this book of ours
Should sometimes make you think of flowers,
Orchards and barns and harvest wain,
"It was not written all in vain--"
So authors used to make their bow,
As, Gentle Reader, we do now_.