The light Gaspé canoe sped away up stream close to the shores, with
Archibald Lyndsay and Rose. They were contentedly quiet for an hour or
more, and at last left behind them the island camp and its white tents,
and then the last of the clearings and the lower alluvial meadows with
their richly feathered elms. As they went on, the hills were more abrupt
and closer to the river, or precipitous past the power of the hardiest
pines to find more than here and there a foothold.
And now Lyndsay laughed, and Rose, curious, inquired why.
“I was thinking of the boys”; and he told her of the hornets’ nest.
“I don’t think the dear mother will like it,” said Rose.
“Perhaps,—oh, assuredly not; but what on earth can one do with three
young steam-engines?”
“It’s very, very dreadful, papa, and do not tell; but I would like to be
present at the siege of the hornets’ nest. It must be awfully good fun.”
“What was that you said?”
“I said awfully good fun. And also I desire to add that this is my day,
and I shall say what I please, do what I please, talk slang and bad
grammar by the yard if I want to.”
“As you like,—I make but one condition: there is to be none of that
wading into deep waters of which you and Anne are so fond. I get enough
of that at home, in my work. This is to be a tree-and-water day. I want
to push on first up to the burnt lands. Some twenty years ago the upper
country was burned off, so that, between the hills and the river are
long abrupt slopes with low underbrush and millions of dead trees. The
tops of the hills are also covered with the same mighty stubble.”
“But that cannot be beautiful.”
“No and yes. I fished above there one year, and for some days I found
the desolation most oppressive. Then, one evening, I saw something in
these gray dead trees, and ever since I have seen in them more and more
that is strange or even beautiful.”
“I think I have felt like that at times,—as if of a sudden I had become
another person, and saw with strange eyes. Once we were looking at
Ruysdael’s pictures; it was at Amsterdam, and Aunt Anne said how
delightful it would be just in a moment to see the world of things as a
great master does, or the world of men as a poet may.”
“What spirit made me his own I do not know, my dear,” said Lyndsay;
“but, if he fled, he left me some permanent property. There is a bit of
St. Clair’s verse which puts it fairly.”
“And it is—Pardy?”
“I think I can repeat it, but I am never sure about my quotations:
‘If from the vantage of thy wiser heart
I could look out on nature through thine eyes,
I think that I should learn a novel art,
And joyful capture some divine surprise.
The tiny morrow of the opening rose,
With kindred comment of thy genius viewed,
Might to love’s wisdom eagerly disclose
The mystery of some new beatitude.’
Perhaps you will like my dead trees at first sight.”
“I can hardly fancy that.”
“Oh, you may. The afternoon is the time for the water. The black flies
are pretty thick, Rose, eh?”
“They don’t trouble me,” she returned. “I can’t say why. They bite, and
that is all.”
“I never could account for the exceptions,” he said. “Ned is tormented
by them, and they hardly touch Jack.”
“How curious!”
“Yes. My own foes are the sand-flies, what are called by the Indians
‘no-see-ums,’ and in Pennsylvania pungies. I brought a little smudge-pot
and a small A-tent, just to give you shelter at need.” Meanwhile the
poles rang ceaselessly, and the talk went on.
“I think, Pardy, the landscape under the water is almost as attractive
as that above it. The stones seem to be all colors, and, I suppose, all
shapes, because they play such queer tricks with the water. I never
noticed until yesterday that when a wave rolls over a large, smooth rock
it takes perfectly the form of a shell,—I think I mean a scallop-shell.”
“That is so, Rose. There, over there, is an example. I think it a very
pretty idea,—one might be ingeniously poetical about it, but one won’t.”
By and by the stream stretched out shallow and broad, and the men took
their paddles. Then they turned a sharp angle of the river and came
among the burnt lands. Here and there a few great trees had strangely
survived the fire, and towered high, green cones among the ruin.
“I can see no beauty in it,” said Rose.
“I said it was strange, interesting, and had certain beauties. Wait a
little. Land us on the island, Tom,—at the upper end. There will be more
air. There is a good bit of grass and a spring near by.”
Pretty soon the tent was up, and the smudge-pot, full of cedar bark,
lighted. There was some wind, however, and the flies were not annoying.
“But what am I to sketch?”
“Let us sit in the opening of the tent. And now, my pipe. Let us first
consider, Rosy, the eccentricities of these burnt trees. I want a sketch
of some of them.”
“Why are they not black? I see very few that are charred.”
“Ask Tom,—it will amuse you.” She did so.
“Them trees, when there’s a fire, and there ain’t too many pines and
firs, the fire it just eats up their leaves and scorches their hides.”
“Bark?”
“Yes; and the winds and the frost and the sun, they peels off the dead
hides. After that them trees lasts powerful long. But if the bark be on,
they rots.”
“What I want just now, Rose, is to get you to look at those few isolated
skeletons of dead trees on the point. There are many as odd in the
wood-tangle below, but these above you can more readily sketch for me,
because they stand by themselves. We will come back to the rest by and
by.”
“Oh, my dear, dear M. A., what a fine master you are! I used to long for
you, and that book we were to write, on the ‘Art of Seeing.’”
“Yes, I have taught myself to see. While you are sketching I will
lecture a little.”
“And just what do you wish me to draw?”
“Take your field-glass and look at the trees on the point. Now, the one
at the edge,—look at it; I do not want to tell you about it, I want you
to see.”
“Well,” said Rose, talking as she sat in the tent-shadow, the glass at
her eyes, “I see a tall dead tree,—a fir? No, a dead spruce,—probably a
spruce, I am not sure. It is gray, and has only two great limbs left,
and a tuft of dead twigs above—and—the trunk is oddly twisted to the
left.”
“Now you are getting warm, as the children say. Hey, Rose?”
“I see,” she cried, with a real joy in her mind; and, taking her pencil,
swiftly drew the desolate dead thing, while Lyndsay looked on.
“Good!” he said; “very good. You have it precisely. I will make a
word-sketch, and we will compare work. I can’t draw a straight line, as
you know. I conceive of the other world, not entirely as a place to
develop our own qualities, but where there will be a pleasant
interchange of capacities. There, my dear, I shall sing like Nilsson and
paint like Velasquez.”
“I think I could myself make some pleasant exchanges,” said Rose. “Those
stiff lines of the dead branchless firs and pines, set against that dark
cloud,—they remind me of the lances in that great picture by Velasquez
at Madrid,—the Surrender of Breda. I loved the two men in that picture.
Requesens is taking the keys of the town from Don John of Nassau, and he
is just saying, ‘Might have happened to any fellow,—so sorry for you!’
You know, papa?”
“No, I do not. But I recall Macbeth’s etching of the picture. Go on with
your sketch. Mine will be done in a few minutes.”
Then he wrote in his note-book again, glancing now and then at the tree.
“Listen, Rose. How is this? ‘Tree sketch: dead tree; no bark; cool gray
all over; stands alone on point of land. Trunk twisted; only two limbs;
bunched end-twigs. Limbs raised like arms.’ Now, if—mind, if it says to
you—I mean if it has for you a distinct expression—I hate affectation
here and everywhere: but if this distorted thing really expresses for
you—something—label it!”
Rose was still a moment, and then said, “It is rooted there, still,
alone. It seems to be turning back toward its fellows. It suggests to me
utter dreariness. What have you found to say about it, Pardy?”
“See, dear, I have written, as I often do at the end of a word-sketch:
‘Loneliness, suffering; isolated anguish, if you like.’”
“I see. How very, very interesting! It seems to remember the fire,
father.” It was sometimes this, and sometimes Pardy, or Marcus Aurelius,
or any queer pet-name of nursery origin.
“You begin to see what one may get out of a dead tree?”
“Yes. There is another, below,—just below.”
“Yes; I sketched it last year. Here it is: ‘Dead tree; poplar; split by
lightning; black and gray. The lower half thrown out like a leg. Above,
one limb has fallen against the trunk; top of tree tufted and thrown
back. Queer expression of jollity.’ Sketch it, dear.
“How ready you are!” he said, over her shoulder. “Look at the one
farther away,—bent back with two great limbs high in air. It is prayer,
deprecation—dread: I am not sure,—and again, before you draw it, look
across to the other side. This is my sketch. ‘Late twilight; a huge,
gray rock in the water. Deep cleft in it; out of this rises a dead pine.
It leans toward me. Two vast limbs extended right and left. Top tufted
as usual, and bent to one side. All set against a bleak mass of
boulders.’”
“I see, even in this light; but at dusk! at dusk it must be terrible,—a
crucifixion!”
“Yes, that is it. It recalls to me an odd thing. A few years ago I was
fishing as late as ten o’clock at night on the Metapedia, and, looking
up, saw on the hill above me a cross set against the blood-red, newly
risen moon. Next morning I perceived that it was only a telegraph-pole
with its cross-bar.”
“What a theme for Heine!” said Rose.
“Yes, indeed. Now sketch me this, and the other trees. I want only just
mere hints of form. There are no end of strange things among dead trees.
I could not exhaust them in hours of description. There was last year a
fallen tree on an island near our camp. I suppose the mass of stuff sent
down by freshets protected it below, and the ice and so on swept away
the branches which lay uppermost. At last the wreckage was washed off.
When I came on it at evening it looked like one of those prehistoric
lizards Dicky delights in. There were many legs on each side as it lay
and—”
“Do let me see, Pardy. You drew it?” and she laughed. “I don’t think it
would go into the _Salon_. There ought to be a place for embryo art like
this.”
“Like ‘Rejected Addresses’?”
“Yes; the real ones.”
“Do you frame yours, Rose?”
“Oh, for shame!”
“Who rose to that fly?”
“But you coldly planned it. It was base.”
“Poor thing!” he laughed—
“The wail of the salmon
A man tried to gammon.
Alas, poor Rose!”
“Wait a bit. As Jack says, ‘That drawing is unique.’”
“I am quite proud of it. I wanted to give you the lesson. Now I will
smoke and talk and take mine ease, while you draw.”
“I can talk and sketch, too.”
“No doubt. On the Nipigon River there is a long carry once burned over.
After the fire must have come a windfall. The whole blasted forest went
down before it. It lies to-day a grim tangle of gray or black trunks,
with huge agonized arms extended upward. At dusk it is very striking.
Years went by, and then I saw the dead Confederates lying below Round
Top the day after the fight, with arms and legs in rigid extension,—a
most horrible memory. As I looked, it recalled that wrecked forest.”
“How dreadful, Pardy! I think I could draw those trees as you describe
them. I will try to-morrow.”
Meanwhile, as she sketched, he went on:
“The growth of power to see is a curiously interesting thing. There is a
disease or disorder called ‘mind-blindness,’ about which the doctor was
telling me a few weeks ago. People who have it see things only as a
mirror sees, and cannot give them names; but if they touch or handle
them, are able to say what they are, or to tell their uses. Think, now,
of a baby. It merely sees things as a mirror sees. Later, it learns the
qualities of things seen, remembers them, learns to group them, and so
to say at last what the thing is, or is for. Some people seem to stop in
their education a little way beyond their baby gains, and at least never
learn to get out of mere observation any pleasure.”
“But one may make many uses of this power to see. Now, the poets—”
“Stop a moment. The poets get an absurd amount of credit for being able
to see as other men do not; but, really, the pleasantest people for a
woodland walk are those naturalists who see far more than the poet, and
combine with their science, or have with it, the love of things for the
mere beauty in them. I never did walk with a poet in a wood. I think I
should see all he saw.”
“But not the same way.”
“I would dispute that, if you mean to say I get less pleasure, Rose. And
there is some nonsense in the notion that poets are very close observers
of nature. They vary, of course. Take Wordsworth, he was a mere child in
minute observation compared to Shakspere. Tennyson is better, too,—oh,
by far; and any clever naturalist sees far more than any one of them.”
“And now, I know, Pardy, you are going to advise me to read Ruskin,
because that is the way you always used to wind up our talks.”
“I was, dear.”
“I must try him again. Aunt Anne says we grow up to the stature of
certain books as we get older, and at last can look them in the eyes and
say, ‘We understand one another.’ As to what you say of Wordsworth, I
shall ask her what she thinks.”
“We shall not differ,” said Lyndsay. “I see you have done your sketch.
Let us have lunch. Afterward, if there is time, we can take a look at
these trees when the evening shadows are falling. We have by no means
done with them.”
Meanwhile Tom and his bowman had made the fire. The salmon was
deliciously broiled, for these woodmen are nearly all good cooks; the
potatoes roasted in the hot ashes; the bacon, broiled with the salmon,
in thin slices, brown and crisp. Rose thought there could be no meal
like this. It was set out on a flat rock, with birch-bark for plates.
The spring was a little way back of them.
“Let us go for the water ourselves,” said Lyndsay.
They walked down the island a hundred yards, and there, in deep woods,
found two rocks fallen together, and under them a pretty little rise of
water, bubbling up out of the earth.
“That is really a spring,” said Rose. “One uses words until one forgets
to think of their meaning. How cold it is!”
“Yes 38°,—and delicious.” He twisted a bit of red birch-bark into a cup,
and put a split twig at each end to keep it together. Then he filled it,
and she drank, throwing her hair back with one hand, and flashing
laughter over the brim of the cup from eyes the color of which has never
been rightly settled to this day.
“More lunch, Rose?”
“A little jam and a biscuit.”
Archibald Lyndsay lit a pipe and lay upon his back on the meager
grasses, with hands clasped behind his head. His eyes wandered from the
clouds overhead to Rose, and thence to wood or stream.
“The court has dined, M. A.,” she said. “What now?”
“I am afraid,” he returned, “it is too late for you to sketch in colors
the trees, or even a bit of them. I wanted to get your notion of the
tints; but look at this—I am not quite sure I myself see colors at their
true values. There is no standard in which to try our sense of color. I
am sure some men see a tint bright, and some see it darker, and then
some artists are sensational in their statement of colors on canvas.”
“I should like to try.”
“We are a little too late; but the sun is back of us yet. That is
essential. Now, keep in shadow, and tell me the color of those sun-lit
myriads of dead pine and fir and spruce and poplar.”
“How they shine!”
“Yes; they are very hard, and polished by storm and sun. They are about
a hundred yards distant. Near by they are silvery-gray. At their feet is
a mass of young birch and beech, and feathered ferns below, along the
margin.”
“They are purple,—clear, distinct purple,” said Rose. “Of course, they
are purple.”
“Yes. Now look at the river.” All between the two observers and the
trees was a swift flow of hastening water, faintly fretted all over by
the underlying brown and gray and white stones of the bottom,—a
tremulous brown mirror.
“Oh, the beautiful things!” cried Rose. “Purple reflections,—deeper
purple than the trees. How they wriggle!”
“Put me the two purples on paper.”
“There!” she said, “that is as I see them.”
“And I,” he returned,—“for me they should be a much deeper, purer tint.
That is the difference between your color sense and mine.”
“Is it true, Pardy, that there may be colors no man has seen?”
“Yes.”
“And sounds no man has heard?”
“Yes.”
“‘Heard sounds are sweet, but sounds unheard are sweeter.’”
“Your quotation sets one’s imagination free to rove. Think of extending
the gamut of human thought. I cannot imagine that; and, as to your poet,
he did not mean, I suppose, the sounds man never heard are sweeter; but
then one has his freedom of interpreting the words of genius. They
always build better than they know.”
“Aunt Anne says that is so beautifully illustrated by the view a man of
science would take to-day of St. Paul’s words: ‘The eye cannot say to
the hand, I have no need of thee.’”
“The point is well taken, as we lawyers say. But that must do for
to-day. Come, Tom, you and Bill can smoke your pipes in the middle of
the skiff. Put Miss Rose in the bow, I will take the stern.”
“And am I to paddle? What fun!”
“Yes. In with you.” And the boat fled away down the swift waters, with
here and there, where the billows rolled high over a deeply hidden rock,
a wild roller which swept them on as with the rush of a bird through
space, while Rose laughed out the joy of a great delight, for of all
modes of motion this is the most satisfying.
“It isn’t difficult,” she said.
“No, and it is a noble exercise. Look! Look, Rose! See that hawk,—no, it
is an eagle. Don’t you envy him? What are those lines Anne loves to
quote about the hawk and the lark? They are called ‘True Captivity.’”
“I forget all but the last two lines. It contrasts the two prisoners,
and says of the lark:
‘He has the heaven which he sings,
But my poor hawk has only wings.’”
“Thank you. There used to be an imprisoned hawk in a cage at the lower
clearing. The melancholy of his great yellow eyes so troubled me that I
bought him, and, to Churchman’s amazement, opened his cage. The poor old
warrior walked out, looked around him, and then walked back again into
voluntary captivity.”
“Like the man of the Bastille.”
“Yes. I shut the cage and took it down to the river. There I left it,
open. Next day I saw him perched above it on a dead tamarack, swinging
in a wild wind. The day after he was gone.”
“I wonder if he regrets the cage and the certainty of full diet.”
“Ah! liberty is very sweet. I sometimes wonder whether, when this
earthly cage is opened, we shall linger about it like my hawk.”
For a time they speed onward, silent, as the shadows grew across the
waters. Said Lyndsay, at length: “One more thing to note: the sun is
down, but see how that huge array of gleaming, seried tree-trunks, away
up on the hilltops, takes the light we have lost.”
Rose looked, and saw on the far summits that the multitudinous
tree-stems were of a lovely lemon yellow, and below, where their lines
crossed at the intercepting angles of two slopes, of a pallid lilac.
“I think we have learned to use our eyes to-day. No need to paddle here.
Take a rest. We are going at the rate of five miles an hour.”
In the gathering dusk they flitted past the camp-fires on the island,
and soon were at their cabin door.
“Shall I ever have another day like this?” said Rose, as she ran up the
steps. “Thank you, Pardy.”