Two days before Christmas the ground was still bare. I had a splendid
new cutter with a top and side curtains; a heavy outfit, but one that
would stand up, I believed, under any road conditions. I was anxious to
use it, too, for I intended to spend a two weeks’ holiday up north with
my family. I was afraid, if I used the buggy, I might find it impossible
to get back to town, seeing that the first heavy winter storms usually
set in about the turn of the year.
School had closed at noon. I intended to set out next morning at as
early an hour as I could. I do not know what gave me my confidence, but
I firmly expected to find snow on the ground by that time. I am rather
a student of the weather. I worked till late at night getting my cutter
ready. I had to adjust my buggy pole and to stow away a great number of
parcels. The latter contained the first real doll for my little girl,
two or three picture books, a hand sleigh, Pip--a little stuffed dog of
the silkiest fluffiness--and as many more trifles for wife and child as
my Christmas allowance permitted me to buy. It was the first time in the
five years of my married life that, thanks to my wife’s co-operation in
earning money, there was any Christmas allowance to spend; and since I
am writing this chiefly for her and the little girl’s future reading,
I want to set it down here, too, that it was thanks to this very same
co-operation that I had been able to buy the horses and the driving
outfit which I needed badly, for the poor state of my health forbade
more rigorous exercise. I have already said, I think, that I am
essentially an outdoor creature; and for several years the fact that I
had been forced to look at the out-of-doors from the window of a town
house only, had been eating away at my vitality. Those drives took
decades off my age, and in spite of incurable illness my few friends say
that I look once more like a young man.
Besides my Christmas parcels I had to take oats along, enough to feed
the horses for two weeks. And I was, as I said, engaged that evening in
stowing everything away, when about nine o’clock one of the physicians
of the town came into the stable. He had had a call into the country, I
believe, and came to order a team. When he saw me working in the shed,
he stepped up and said, “You’ll kill your horses.” “Meaning?” I queried.
“I see you are getting your cutter ready,” he replied. “If I were you, I
should stick to the wheels.” I laughed. “I might not be able to get back
to work.” “Oh yes,” he scoffed, “it won’t snow up before the end of
next month. We figure on keeping the cars going for a little while yet.”
Again I laughed. “I hope not,” I said, which may not have sounded very
gracious.
At ten o’clock every bolt had been tightened, the horses’ harness and
their feed were ready against the morning, and everything looked good to
me.
I was going to have the first real Christmas again in twenty-five years,
with a real Christmas tree, and with wife and child, and even though
it was a poor man’s Christmas, I refused to let anything darken my
Christmas spirit or dull the keen edge of my enjoyment. Before going
out, I stepped into the office of the stable, slipped a half-dollar into
the hostler’s palm and asked him once more to be sure to have the horses
fed at half-past five in the morning.
Then I left. A slight haze filled the air, not heavy enough to blot out
the stars; but sufficient to promise hoarfrost at least. Somehow there
was no reason to despair as yet of Christmas weather.
I went home and to bed and slept about as soundly as I could wish. When
the alarm of my clock went off at five in the morning, I jumped out of
bed and hurried down to shake the fire into activity. As soon as I had
started something of a blaze, I went to the window and looked out. It
was pitch dark, of course, the moon being down by this time, but it
seemed to me that there was snow on the ground. I lighted a lamp and
held it to the window; and sure enough, its rays fell on white upon
white on shrubs and fence posts and window ledge. I laughed and
instantly was in a glow of impatience to be off.
At half past five, when the coffee water was in the kettle and on the
stove, I hurried over to the stable across the bridge. The snow was
three inches deep, enough to make the going easy for the horses. The
slight haze persisted, and I saw no stars. At the stable I found, of
course, that the horses had not been fed; so I gave them oats and
hay and went to call the hostler. When after much knocking at last
he responded to my impatience, he wore a guilty look on his face but
assured me that he was just getting up to feed my team. “Never mind
about feeding,” I said “I’ve done that. But have them harnessed and
hitched up by a quarter past six. I’ll water them on the road.” They
never drank their fill before nine o’clock. And I hurried home to get my
breakfast...
“Merry Christmas!” the hostler called after me; and I shouted back over
my shoulder, “The same to you.” The horses were going under the merry
jingle of the bells which they carried for the first time this winter.
I rarely could hold them down to a walk or a trot now, since the
cold weather had set in; and mostly, before they even had cleared the
slide-doors, they were in a gallop. Peter had changed his nature since
he had a mate. By feeding and breeding he was so much Dan’s superior in
vitality that, into whatever mischief the two got themselves, he was
the leader. For all times the picture, seen by the light of a lantern,
stands out in my mind how he bit at Dan, wilfully, urging him playfully
on, when we swung out into the crisp, dark, hazy morning air. Dan being
nothing loth and always keen at the start, we shot across the bridge.
It was hard now, mostly, to hitch them up. They would leap and rear
with impatience when taken into the open before they were hooked to the
vehicle. They were being very well fed, and though once a week they had
the hardest of work, for the rest of the time they had never more than
enough to limber them up, for on schooldays I used to take them out for
a spin of three or four miles only, after four. At home, when I left, my
wife and I would get them ready in the stable; then I took them out and
lined them up in front of the buggy. My wife quickly took the lines: I
hooked the traces up, jumped in, grabbed for the lines and waved my last
farewell from the road afar off. Even at that they got away from us
once or twice and came very near upsetting and wrecking the buggy; but
nothing serious ever happened during the winter. I had to have horses
like that, for I needed their speed and their staying power, as the
reader will see if he cares to follow me very much farther.
We flew along--the road seemed ideal--the air was wonderfully crisp and
cold--my cutter fulfilled the highest expectations--the horses revelled
in speed. But soon I pulled them down to a trot, for I followed the
horsemen’s rules whenever I could, and Dan, as I mentioned, was anyway
rather too keen at the start for steady work later on. I settled back.
The top of my cutter was down, for not a breath stirred; and I was
always anxious to see as much of the country as I could...
Do you know which is the stillest hour of the night? The hour before
dawn. It is at that time, too, that in our winter nights the mercury
dips down to its lowest level. Perhaps the two things have a causal
relation--whatever there is of wild life in nature, withdraws more
deeply within itself; it curls up and dreams. On calm summer mornings
you hear no sound except the chirping and twittering of the sleeping
birds. The birds are great dreamers--like dogs; like dogs they will
twitch and stir in their sleep, as if they were running and flying and
playing and chasing each other. Just stalk a bird’s nest of which you
know at half past two in the morning, some time during the month of
July; and before you see them, you will hear them. If there are young
birds in the nest, all the better; take the mother bird off and the
little ones will open their beaks, all mouth as they are, and go to
sleep again; and they will stretch their featherless little wings; and
if they are a little bit older, they will even try to move their tiny
legs, as if longing to use them. As with dogs, it is the young ones
that dream most. I suppose their impressions are so much more vivid, the
whole world is so new to them that it rushes in upon them charged
with emotion. Emotions penetrate even us to a greater depth than mere
apperceptions; so they break through that crust that seems to envelop
the seat of our memory, and once inside, they will work out again into
some form of consciousness--that of sleep or of the wakeful dream which
we call memory.
The stillest hour! In starlit winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to
take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening
boastfulness. “Now sleeps the world,” they seem to say, “but we are
awake and weaving destiny” And on they swing on their immutable paths.
The stillest hour! If you step out of a sleeping house and are alone,
you are apt to hold your breath; and if you are not, you are apt to
whisper. There is an expectancy in the air, a fatefulness--a loud word
would be blasphemy that offends the ear and the feeling of decency It
is the hour of all still things, the silent things that pass like dreams
through the night. You seem to stand hushed. Stark and bare, stripped of
all accidentals, the universe swings on its way.
The stillest hour! But how much stiller than still, when the earth has
drawn over its shoulders that morning mist that allows of no slightest
breath--when under the haze the very air seems to lie curled and to have
gone to sleep. And yet how portentous! The haze seems to brood. It seems
somehow to suggest that there is all of life asleep on earth. You
seem to feel rather than to hear the whole creation breathing in
its sleep--as if it was soundlessly stirring in dreams--presently to
stretch, to awake. There is also the delicacy, the tenderness of all
young things about it. Even in winter it reminds me of the very first
unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are
still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so
worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie
all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the
earth--under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the
contrast of the universe and of creation.
We drove along--and slowly, slowly came the dawn. You could not define
how it came. The whole world seemed to pale and to whiten, and that was
all. There was no sunrise. It merely seemed as if all of Nature--very
gradually--was soaking itself full of some light; it was dim at first,
but never grey; and then it became the whitest, the clearest, the most
undefinable light. There were no shadows. Under the brush of the wild
land which I was skirting by now there seemed to be quite as much of
luminosity as overhead. The mist was the thinnest haze, and it seemed to
derive its whiteness as much from the virgin snow on the ground as from
above. I could not cease to marvel at this light which seemed to be
without a source--like the halo around the Saviour’s face. The eye as
yet did not reach very far, and wherever I looked, I found but one word
to describe it: impalpable--and that is saying what it was not rather
than what it was. As I said, there was no sunshine, but the light was
there, omnipresent, diffused, coming mildly, softly, but from all sides,
and out of all things as well as into them.
Shakespeare has this word in Macbeth, and I had often pondered on it:
So fair and foul a day I have not seen.
This was it, I thought. We have such days about four or five times
a year--and none but the northern countries have them. There are
clouds--or rather, there is a uniform layer of cloud, very high, and
just the slightest suggestion of curdiness in it; and the light is very
white. These days seem to waken in me every wander instinct that
lay asleep. There is nothing definite, nothing that seems to be
emphasized--something seems to beckon to me and to invite me to take to
my wings and just glide along--without beating of wings--as if I could
glide without sinking, glide and still keep my height... If you see the
sun at all--as I did not on this day of days--he stands away up, very
distant and quite aloof. He looks more like the moon than like his own
self, white and heatless and lightless, as if it were not he at all from
whom all this transparency and visibility proceeded.
I have lived in southern countries, and I have travelled rather far for
a single lifetime. Like an epic stretch my memories into dim and ever
receding pasts. I have drunk full and deep from the cup of creation.
The Southern Cross is no strange sight to my eyes. I have slept in the
desert close to my horse, and I have walked on Lebanon. I have cruised
in the seven seas and seen the white marvels of ancient cities reflected
in the wave of incredible blueness. But then I was young. When the years
began to pile up, I longed to stake off my horizons, to flatten out my
views. I wanted the simpler, the more elemental things, things cosmic
in their associations, nearer to the beginning or end of creation. The
parrot that flashed through “nutmeg groves” did not hold out so much
allurement as the simple gray-and-slaty junco. The things that are
unobtrusive and differentiated by shadings only--grey in grey above
all--like our northern woods, like our sparrows, our wolves--they held
a more compelling attraction than orgies of colour and screams of sound.
So I came home to the north. On days like this, however, I should like
once more to fly out and see the tireless wave and the unconquerable
rock. But I should like to see them from afar and dimly only--as Moses
saw the promised land. Or I should like to point them out to a younger
soul and remark upon the futility and innate vanity of things.
And because these days take me out of myself, because they change my
whole being into a very indefinite longing and dreaming, I wilfully blot
from my vision whatever enters. If I meet a tree, I see it not. If
I meet a man, I pass him by without speaking. I do not care to be
disturbed. I do not care to follow even a definite thought. There is
sadness in the mood, such sadness as enters--strange to say--into a
great and very definitely expected disappointment. It is an exceedingly
delicate sadness--haughty, aloof like the sun, and like him cool to the
outer world. It does not even want sympathy; it merely wants to be left
alone.
It strangely chimed in with my mood on this particular and very perfect
morning that no jolt shook me up, that we glided along over virgin snow
which had come soft-footedly over night, in a motion, so smooth and
silent as to suggest that wingless flight...
We spurned the miles, and I saw them not. As if in a dream we turned in
at one of the “half way farms,” and the horses drank. And we went on
and wound our way across that corner of the marsh. We came to the “White
Range Line House,” and though there were many things to see, I still
closed the eye of conscious vision and saw them not. We neared the
bridge, and we crossed it; and then--when I had turned southeast--on to
the winding log-road through the bush--at last the spell that was cast
over me gave way and broke. My horses fell into their accustomed walk,
and at last I saw.
Now, what I saw, may not be worth the describing, I do not know. It
surely is hardly capable of being described. But if I had been led
through fairylands or enchanted gardens, I could not have been awakened
to a truer day of joy, to a greater realization of the good will towards
all things than I was here.
Oh, the surpassing beauty of it! There stood the trees, motionless under
that veil of mist, and not their slenderest finger but was clothed in
white. And the white it was! A translucent white, receding into itself,
with strange backgrounds of white behind it--a modest white, and yet
full of pride. An elusive white, and yet firm and substantial. The
white of a diamond lying on snow white velvet, the white of a diamond
in diffused light. None of the sparkle and colour play that the most
precious of stones assumes under a definite, limited light which
proceeds from a definite, limited source. Its colour play was suggested,
it is true, but so subdued that you hardly thought of naming or even
recognising its component parts. There was no red or yellow or blue or
violet, but merely that which might flash into red and yellow and blue
and violet, should perchance the sun break forth and monopolize
the luminosity of the atmosphere. There was, as it were, a latent
opalescence.
And every twig and every bough, every branch and every limb, every trunk
and every crack even in the bark was furred with it. It seemed as if
the hoarfrost still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was
nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with
its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were
large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness
and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip
touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall.
And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike
needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in
between. There was such an air of fragility about it all that you hated
to touch it--and I, for one, took my whip down lest it shook bare too
many boughs.
Whoever has seen the trees like that--and who has not?--will see with
his mind’s eye what I am trying to suggest rather than to describe. It
was never the single sight nor the isolated thing that made my drives
the things of beauty which they were. There was nothing remarkable in
them either. They were commonplace enough. I really do not know why I
should feel urged to describe our western winters. Whatever I may be
able to tell you about them, is yours to see and yours to interpret. The
gifts of Nature are free to all for the asking. And yet, so it seems to
me, there is in the agglomerations of scenes and impressions, as they
followed each other in my experience, something of the quality of a
great symphony; and I consider this quality as a free and undeserved
present which Chance or Nature shook out of her cornucopia so it
happened to fall at my feet. I am trying to render this quality here for
you.
On that short mile along the first of the east-west grades, before again
I turned into the bush, I was for the thousandth time in my life struck
with the fact how winter blots out the sins of utility. What is useful,
is often ugly because in our fight for existence we do not always
have time or effort to spare to consider the looks of things. But the
slightest cover of snow will bury the eyesores. Snow is the greatest
equalizer in Nature. No longer are there fields and wild lands,
beautiful trails and ugly grades--all are hidden away under that which
comes from Nature’s purest hands and fertile thoughts alone. Now there
was no longer the raw, offending scar on Nature’s body; just a smooth
expanse of snow white ribbon that led afar.
That led afar! And here is a curious fact. On this early December
morning--it was only a little after nine when I started the horses into
their trot again--I noticed for the first time that this grade which
sprang here out of the bush opened up to the east a vista into a
seemingly endless distance. Twenty-six times I had gone along this piece
of it, but thirteen times it had been at night, and thirteen times I
had been facing west, when I went back to the scene of my work. So I
had never looked east very far. This morning, however, in this strange
light, which was at this very hour undergoing a subtle change that I
could not define as yet, mile after mile of road seemed to lift itself
up in the far away distance, as if you might drive on for ever through
fairyland. The very fact of its straightness, flanked as it was by the
rows of frosted trees, seemed like a call. And a feeling that is very
familiar to me--that of an eternity in the perpetuation of whatever may
be the state I happen to be in, came over me, and a desire to go on and
on, for ever, and to see what might be beyond...
But then the turn into the bushy trail was reached. I did not see the
slightest sign of it on the road. But Dan seemed infallible--he made
the turn. And again I was in Winter’s enchanted palace, again the slight
whirl in the air that our motion set up made the fairy tracery of
the boughs shower down upon me like snow white petals of flowers, so
delicate that to disturb the virginity of it all seemed like profaning
the temple of the All-Highest.
But then I noticed that I had not been the first one to visit the
woods. All over their soft-napped carpet floor there were the restless,
fleeting tracks of the snowflake, lacing and interlacing in lines and
loops, as if they had been assembled in countless numbers, as no doubt
they had. And every track looked like nothing so much as like that kind
of embroidery, done white upon white, which ladies, I think; call the
feather stitch. In places I could clearly see how they had chased and
pursued each other, running, and there was a merriness about their
spoors, a suggestion of swiftness which made me look up and about to
see whether they were not wheeling their restless curves and circles
overhead. But in this I was disappointed for the moment, though only a
little later I was to see them in numbers galore. It was on that last
stretch of my road, when I drove along the dam of the angling ditch.
There they came like a whirlwind and wheeled and curved and circled
about as if they knew no enemy, feeding meanwhile with infallible skill
from the tops of seed-bearing weeds while skimming along. But I am
anticipating just now In the bush I saw only their trails. Yet they
suggested their twittering and whistling even there; and since on the
gloomiest day their sound and their sight will cheer you, you surely
cannot help feeling glad and overflowing with joy when you see any sign
of them on a day like this!
Meanwhile we were winging along ourselves, so it seemed. For there was
the second east-west grade ahead. And that made me think of wife and
child to whom I was coming like Santa Claus, and so I stopped under
a bush that overhung the trail; and though I hated to destroy even a
trifling part of the beauty around, I reached high up with my whip and
let go at the branches, so that the moment before the horses bolted, the
flakes showered down upon me and my robes and the cutter and changed me
into a veritable snowman in snow white garb.
And then up on the grade. One mile to the east, and the bridge appeared.
It did not look like the work of man. Apart from its straight lines it
resembled more the architecture of a forest brook as it will build after
heavy fall rains followed by a late drought when all the waters of
the wild are receding so that the icy cover stands above them like the
arches of a bridge. It is strange how rarely the work of man will really
harmonize with Nature. The beaver builds, and his work will blend. Man
builds, and it jars--very likely because he mostly builds with silly
pretensions. But in winter Nature breathes upon his handiwork and
transforms it. Bridges may be imposing and of great artificial beauty in
cities--as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber
just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web
engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge--but if in the wilderness we
run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and
they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung
trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is
exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it
that they reconcile by their overweening boldness, by their very
paradoxality--as there is beauty even in the hawk’s bloodthirsty
savagery. To-day this bridge was, like the grades, like the trees and
the meadows furred over with opalescent, feathery frost.
And the dam over which I am driving now! This dam that erstwhile was
a very blasphemy, an obscenity flung on the marshy meadows with their
reeds, their cat-tails, and their wide-leaved swamp-dock clusters! It
had been used by the winds as a veritable dumping ground for obnoxious
weeds which grew and thrived on the marly clay while every other plant
despised it! Not that I mean to decry weeds--far be it from me. When the
goldenrod flings its velvet cushions along the edge of the copses, or
when the dandelion spangles the meadows, they are things of beauty
as well as any tulip or tiger-lily. But when they or their rivals,
silverweed, burdock, false ragweed, thistles, gumweed, and others usurp
the landscape and seem to choke up the very earth and the very air with
ceaseless monotony and repetition, then they become an offence to the
eye and a reproach to those who tolerate them. To-day, however, they all
lent their stalks to support the hoarfrost, to double and quadruple its
total mass. They were powdered over with countless diamonds.
It was here that I met with the flocks of snowflakes; and if my joyous
mood had admitted of any enhancement, they would have given it.
And never before had I seen the school and the cottage from quite so
far! The haze was still there, but somehow it seemed to be further
overhead now, with a stratum of winterclear air underneath. Once before,
when driving along the first east-west grade, where I discovered the
vista, I had wondered at the distance to which the eye could pierce.
Here, on the dam, of course, my vision was further aided by the fact
that whatever of trees and shrubs there was in the way--and a ridge of
poplars ran at right angles to the ditch, throwing up a leafy curtain in
summer--stood bare of its foliage. I was still nearly four miles from my
“home” when I first beheld it. And how pitiably lonesome it looked! Not
another house was to be seen in its neighbourhood. I touched the horses
up with my whip. I felt as if I should fly across the distance and bring
my presence to those in the cottage as their dearest gift. They knew I
was coming. They were at this very moment flying to meet me with their
thoughts. Was I well? Was I finding everything as I had wished to find
it? And though I often told them how I loved and enjoyed my drives,
they could not view them but with much anxiety, for they were waiting,
waiting, waiting... Waiting on Thursday for Friday to come, waiting on
Wednesday and Tuesday and Monday--waiting on Sunday even, as soon as I
had left; counting the days, and the hours, and the minutes, till I was
out, fighting storm and night to my heart’s content! And then--worry,
worry, worry--what might not happen! Whatever my drives were to me, to
them they were horrors. There never were watchers of weather and sky so
anxiously eager as they! And when, as it often, too often happened, the
winter storms came, when care rose, hope fell, then eye was clouded,
thought dulled, heart aflutter... Sometimes the soul sought comfort from
nearest neighbours, and not always was it vouchsafed. “Well,” they
would say, “if he starts out to-day, he will kill his horses!”--or,
“In weather like this I should not care to drive five miles!”--Surely,
surely, I owe it to them, staunch, faithful hearts that they were, to
set down this record so it may gladden the lonesome twilight hours that
are sure to come...
And at last I swung west again, up the ridge and on to the yard. And
there on the porch stood the tall, young, smiling woman, and at her
knee the fairest-haired girl in all the world. And quite unconscious of
Nature’s wonder-garb, though doubtlessly gladdened by it the little girl
shrilled out, “Oh, Daddy, Daddy, did du see Santa Claus?” And I replied
lustily, “Of course, my girl, I am coming straight from his palace.”