On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated
little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or
seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient
farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray
birch--the old field birch of exhausted soils--with dogwood and an
aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and
sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep
couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine.
The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from
these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat
stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the
fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of
gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to
resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the
poor relations they ordinarily are.
And at the upper edge of one steep-lying field, formerly an apple
orchard--though but three or four of the original apple trees remain,
hopelessly decrepit and half buried in the new growth--the older cedars
of the fence line have seeded capriciously and have thrown out an almost
perfect circle of younger, slenderer trees which, standing shoulder to
shoulder, inclose the happiest retreat for woodland god or dreaming
mortal that the most exacting faun or poet could desire.
That Susan should have happened upon this lonely, this magic circle, I
can never regard as a mere accident. Obviously time had slowly and
lovingly formed and perfected it for some purpose; it was there waiting
for her--and one day she came and possessed it, and the magic circle was
complete.
Susan was then seventeen and the season, as it should have been, was
early May. Much of the hill country lying northward from the Connecticut
coast towns is surprisingly wild, and none of it wilder or lovelier than
certain tracts spread within easy reach of the few New Haveners who have
not wholly capitulated to business or college politics or golf or social
service or the movies, forgetting a deeper and saner lure. A later
Wordsworth or Thoreau might still live in midmost New Haven and never
feel shut from his heritage, for it neighbors him closely--swamp and
upland, hemlock cliff and hardwood forest, precipitous brook or
slow-winding meadow stream, where the red-winged blackbirds flute and
flash by; the whole year's wonder awaits him; he has but to go
forth--alone.
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, though she so
ironically betrays most of us who merely pretend to love her, because we
feel, after due instruction, that we ought. For Nature is not easily
communicative, nor lightly wooed. She demands a higher devotion than an
occasional picnic, and will seldom have much to say to you if she feels
that you secretly prefer another society to hers. To her elect she
whispers, timelessly, and Susan, in her own way, was of the elect. It
was the way--the surest--of solitary communion; but it was very little,
very casually, the way of science. She observed much, but without
method; and catalogued not at all. She never counted her warblers and
seldom named them--but she loved them, as they slipped northward through
young leaves, shyly, with pure flashes of green or russet or gold.
Nature for Susan, in short, was all mood, ranging from cold horror to
supernal beauty; she did not sentimentalize the gradations. The cold
horror was there and chilled her, but the supernal beauty was there
too--and did not leave her cold. And through it all streamed an
indefinable awe, a trail one could not follow, a teasing mystery--an
unspoken word. It was back of--no rather it interpenetrated the horror
no less than the beauty; they were but phases, hints, of that other,
that suspected, eerie trail, leading one knew not where.
But surely there, in that magic circle, one might press closer, draw
oneself nearer, catch at the faintest hint toward a possible clue? The
aromatic space within the cedars became Susan's refuge, her nook from
the world, her Port-Royal, her Walden, her Lake Isle of Innisfree. Once
found that spring she never spoke of it; she hoarded her treasure,
slipping off to it stealthily, through slyest subterfuge or evasion,
whenever she could. For was it not hers?
Sometimes she rode out there, tying her horse to a tree in the lowest
field back of a great thicket of old-fashioned lilac bushes run wild,
where he was completely hidden from the rare passers-by of the rough
up-country road or lane. But oftenest, she has since confessed, she
would clear her morning or afternoon by some plausible excuse for
absence, then board the Waterbury trolley express, descending from it
about two miles from her nook, and walking or rather climbing up to it
crosslots through neglected woodland and uncropped pasture reverting to
the savage.
At one point she had to pass a small swampy meadow through which a mere
thread of stream worked its way, half-choked by thick-springing blades
of our native wild iris; so infinitely, so capriciously delicate in form
and hue. And here, if these were in bloom, she always lingered a while,
poised on the harsh hummocks of bent-grass, herself slender as a reed.
The pale, softly pencilled iris petals stirred in her a high wonder
beyond speech. What supreme, whimsical artistry brought them to being
there, in that lonely spot; and for whose joy? No human hand, cunning
with enamel and platinum and treated silver, could, after a lifetime of
patience, reproduce one petal of these uncounted flowers. Out of the
muck they lifted, ethereal, unearthly--yet so soon to die....
Oh, she knew what the learned had to say of them!--that they were merely
sexual devices; painted deceptions for attracting insects and so
assuring cross-pollination and the lusty continuance of their race. So
far as it went this was unquestionably true; but it went--just how far?
Their color and secret manna attracted the necessary insects, which they
fed; the form of their petals and perianth tubes, and the arrangement of
their organs of sex were cunningly evolved, so that the insect that
sought their nectar bore from one flower to the next its fertilizing
golden dust----
Astonishing, certainly! But what astonished her far more was that all
this ingenious mechanism should in any way affect _her_! It was
obviously none of her affair; and yet to come upon these cunning
mechanistic devices in this deserted field stirred her, set something
ineffable free in her--gave it joy for wings. It was as if these pale
blooms of wild iris had been for her, in a less mortal sense, what the
unconscious insects were for them--_intermediaries_, whose more ethereal
contacts cross-fertilized her very soul. But she could not define for
herself or express for others what they did to her. Of one thing only
she was certain: These fleeting moments of expansion, of illumination,
were brief and vague--moments of pure, uncritical feeling--but they were
the best moments of her life; and they were real. They vanished, but not
wholly. They left lasting traces. Never to have been visited by them
would have condemned her, she knew, to be less than her fullest self,
narrower in sympathy, more rigid, more dogmatic, and less complete.
But that first May day of her discovery, when called out to wander
lonely as a cloud by the spirit of spring--the day she had happened on
her magic circle,--all that rough upland world was burgeoning, and the
beauty of those deserted fields hurt the heart. Susan never easily wept,
but that day--safely hidden in the magic circle, then newly hers--she
threw herself down on the ghost-gray moss among the spicy tufts of sweet
fern and enjoyed, as she later told me, the most sensuously abandoned
good cry of her life. The dogwood trees were a glory of flushed white
about her, shining in on every hand through the black-green cedars, as
if the stars had rushed forward toward earth and clustered more thickly
in a nearer midnight sky. Life had no right to be so overwhelmingly
fair--if these poignant gusts of beauty gave no sanction to all that the
bruised heart of man might long for of peace and joy! If life must be
accepted as an idiot's tale, signifying nothing, then it was a
refinement of that torture that it could suddenly lift--as a sterile
wave lifts only to break--to such dizzying, ecstatic heights.... No,
no--it was impossible! It was unthinkable! It was absurd!
That year we spent July, August, and early September in France, but late
September found us back in New Haven for those autumnal weeks which are
the golden, heady wine of our New England cycle. Praise of the New
England October, for those who have experienced it, must always seem
futile, and for those who have not, exaggerated and false. Summer does
not decay in New England; it first smoulders and then flares out in a
clear multicolored glory of flame; it does not sicken to corruption, it
shouts and sings and is transfigured. I had suggested to Susan,
therefore, a flight to higher hills--to the Berkshires, to be
precise--where we might more spaciously watch these smoke-less
frost-fires flicker up, spread, consume themselves, and at last leap
from the crests, to vanish rather than die. But Susan, pleading a desire
to settle down after much wandering, begged off. She did not tell me
that she had a private sanctuary, too long unvisited, hidden among
nearer and humbler hills.
The rough fields of the old farm were now rich with crimson and
gold--bright yellow gold, red gold, green and tarnished gold--or misted
over with the horizon blue of wild asters, a needed softening of tone in
a world else so vibrant with light, so nakedly clear. This was another
and perhaps even a deeper intoxication than that of the flood tide of
spring. Unbearably beautiful it grew at its climax of splendor! An
unseen organist unloosed all his stops, and Susan, like a little child
overpowered by that rocking clamor, was shaken by it and almost
whimpered for mercy....
It was not until the following spring that chance improbably betrayed
her guarded secret to me. All during the preceding fall I had wondered
at times that I found it so increasingly difficult to arrange for
afternoons of tennis or golf or riding with Susan; but I admonished
myself that as she grew up she must inevitably find personal interests
and younger friends, and it was not for me to limit or question her
freedom. And though Susan never lied to me, she was clever enough, and
woman enough, to let me mislead myself.
"I've been taking a long walk, Ambo." "I've been riding."
Well, bless her, so she had--and why shouldn't she? Though it came at
last with me to a vague, comfortless feeling of shut-outness--of too
often missing an undefined something that I had hoped to share.
During a long winter of close companionship in study and socially
unsocial life this feeling disappeared, but with the spring it gradually
formed again, like a little spreading cloud in an empty sky. And one
afternoon, toward middle May, I discovered myself to be unaccountably
alone and wishing Susan were round--so we could "do something." The day
was a day apart. Mummies that day, in dim museums, ached in their
cerements. Middle-aged bank clerks behind grilles knew a sudden unrest,
and one or two of them even wondered whether to be always honestly
handling the false counters of life were any compensation for never
having riotously lived. Little boys along Hillhouse Avenue, ordinarily
well-behaved, turned freakishly truculent, delighted in combat, and
pummelled each other with ineffective fists. Settled professors in
classrooms were seized with irrelevant fancies and, while trying to
recover some dropped thread of discourse, openly sighed--haunted by
visions of the phoebe bird's nest found under the old bridge by the mill
dam, or of the long-forgotten hazel eyes of some twelve-year-old
sweetheart. A rebellious day--and a sentimental! [See Lord Tennyson, and
the poets, _passim_.] The apple trees must be in full bloom....
Well then, confound it, why had Susan gone to a public lecture on
Masefield? Or had she merely mentioned at lunch that there was a public
lecture on Masefield? Oh, damn it! One can't stay indoors on such a day!
Susan and I kept our saddle horses at the local riding academy, where
they were well cared for and exercised on the many days when we couldn't
or did not wish to take them out. As the academy was convenient and had
good locker rooms and showers, we always preferred changing there
instead of dressing at home and having the horses sent round. Riding is
not one of my passions, and oddly enough is not one of Susan's. That
intense sympathy which unites some men and women to horses, and others
to dogs or cats, is either born in one or it is not. Susan felt it very
strongly for both dogs and cats, and if I have failed to mention Tumps
and Togo, that is a lack in myself, not in her. I don't dislike dogs or
cats or, for that matter, well-broken horses, but--though I lose your
last shreds of sympathy--they all, in comparison with other interests,
leave me more than usual calm. Of Tumps and Togo, nevertheless,
something must yet be said, though too late for their place in Susan's
heart; or indeed, for their own deserving. But they are already an
intrusion here.
For Alma, her dainty little single footer, Susan's feeling was rather
admiration than love. Just as there are poets whose songs we praise, but
whose genius does not seem to knit itself into the very fabric of our
being, so it was with Alma and Susan. She said and thought nothing but
good of Alma, yet never felt lonely away from her--the infallible test.
As for Jessica, my own modest nag, I fear she was very little more to me
than an agreeably paced inducement to exercise, and I fear I was little
more to her than a possible source of lump sugar and a not-too-fretful
hand on the bridle reins. To-day, however, I needed her as a more poetic
motor; failing Susan's companionship, I wanted to be carried far out
into country byways apart from merely mechanical motors or--ditto--men.
Jessica, well up to it, offered no objections to the plan, and we were
soon trotting briskly along the aerial Ridge Road, from which we at
length descended to the dark eastern flank of Mount Carmel. It would
mean a long pull to go right round the mountain by the steep back road,
and I had at first no thought of attempting it; but the swift
remembrance of a vast cherry orchard bordering that road made me wonder
whether its blossoms had yet fallen. When I determined finally to push
on, poor Jessica's earlier fire had cooled; we climbed the rough back
road as a slug moves; the cherry orchard proved disappointing; and the
sun was barely two hours from the hills when we crossed the divide and
turned south down a grass-grown wood road that I had never before
traveled. I hoped, and no doubt Jessica hoped, it might prove a shorter
cut home.
What it did prove was so fresh an enchantment of young leaf and
flashing wing, that I soon ceased to care where it led or how late I
might be for dinner. Then a sharp dip in the road brought a new vision
of delight; dogwood--cloudy masses of pink dogwood, the largest,
deepest-tinted trees of it I had ever seen! It caught at my throat; and
I reined in Jessica, whose aesthetic sense was less developed, and
stared. But presently the spell was broken. An unseen horse squealed,
evidently from behind a great lilac thicket in an old field at the left,
and Jessica squealed back, instantly alert and restive. The sharp
whinnying was repeated, and Jessica's dancing excitement grew intense;
then there was a scuffling commotion back of the lilacs and to my final
astonishment Susan's little mare, Alma, having broken her headstall and
wrenched herself free of bit and bridle, came trotting amicably forth to
join her old friends--which she could easily do, as the ancient cattle
bars at the field-gate had long since rotted away.
It was unmistakably dainty Alma with her white forehead star--but where
was her mistress? A finger of ice drew slowly along my spine as I urged
Jessica into the field and round the lilac thicket. Alma meekly followed
us, softly breathing encouragement through pink nostrils, and my alarm
quieted when I found nothing more dreadful than the broken bridle still
dangling from the branch of a dead cedar. It was plain that Susan had
tied Alma there to explore on foot through the higher fields; it was
plain, too, that she must have preferred to ride out here alone, and had
been at some pains to conceal her purpose.
For a second, so piqued was I, I almost decided to ride on and leave the
willful child to her own devices. But the broken bridle shamed me. I
dismounted to examine it; it could be held together safely enough for
the return, I saw, with a piece of stout twine, and there was certain to
be a habitation with a piece of stout twine in it on down the road
somewhere. Susan must have come that way and could tell me. But I must
find her first....
"Susan!" I called. "_Oh-ho-o-o! Soo-san!_"
No answer. I called again--vainly. Nothing for it, then, but a search! I
tethered Jessica to the cedar stump, convinced that Alma wouldn't wander
far from her old friend, and started off through the field past a senile
apple tree bearing a few scattered blossoms, beyond which a faintly
suggested path seemed to lead upward through a wonder-grove of the pink
dogwood, mingled with laurel and birch and towering cedars. That path, I
knew, would have tempted Susan.
What there was of it soon disappeared altogether in an under-thicket of
high-bush huckleberry, taller than a man's head. Through this I was
pushing my way, and had stooped to win past some briers and protect my
eyes--when I felt a silk scarf slip across them, muffling my face.
It was swiftly knotted from behind; then my hand was taken, and Susan's
voice--on a tone of blended mischief and mystery--quavered at my ear:
"Hush! Profane mortal--speak not! This is holy ground."
With not another word spoken she drew me after her, guiding me to freer
air and supporting me when I stumbled. We continued thus for some
moments, on my part clumsily enough; and then Susan halted me, and
turned me solemnly round three times, while she crooned in a weird
gypsy-like singsong the following incantation:
_Cedar, cedar, birch and fern,
Turn his wits as mine you turn._
_If he sees what now I see
Welcome shall this mortal be._
_If he sees it not, I'll say
Crick-crack and vanish May!_
But I must have seen! My initiation was pronounced successful. From that
hour all veils were withdrawn, and I was made free of the magic
circle....
It was a dip in Lethe. Dinner was forgotten--the long miles home and the
broken bridle. A powerful enchantment had done its work. For me, only
the poised moment of joy was real. Nothing else mattered, nothing else
existed, while that poised fragile moment was mine. We talked or were
silent--it was all one. And when dusk crept in, and a grateful
wood-thrush praised it, we still lingered to join in that praise....
Then a whippoorwill began to call insistently, grievously, from very far
off. It was the whippoorwill that shattered my poised crystal moment of
perfect joy.
"Those poor horses," I said.
"Oh!" cried Susan, springing up, "how _could_ we let them starve! I'm
starved, too, Ambo--aren't you? What sillies we are!"
We got home safely, after some trifling difficulties, past ten
o'clock....
_When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead----_
Only it doesn't, always--thank God! Memories.... And this was but one.
Oh, no; I was not to be alone. I should never really be alone....