It was a place to which, as a dreamy, fanciful child escaping from
nursemaid and governess, Virginia had liked to climb on hot summer
afternoons. She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade of
the dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters of the
barn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue river of
sky flowing between the mountain walls.
Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate--the
deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain--but to the
child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over the
little clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered shell
and through the stark skeleton of the barn. The white birches, strange
sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leaves
as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the wounds
of human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had not
lived. And everywhere grew the thick, strong, glistening grass, covering
even the threshold with a cushion on which the child's foot fell as
noiselessly as a shadow. It used to seem to her that nothing could ever
have happened in this breathless spot.
Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old and
had had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age could
have. Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she had
had one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the world.
Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the narrow green
Valley where she had spent so many of her childhood's holidays But now a
whim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old glamour about the
lovely enchanted region still existed for her weary, sophisticated
maturity, had made her break exacting social engagements and sent her back
alone, from the city, to see how the old valley looked in the spring.
Her disappointment was acute. The first impression and the one which
remained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodland
aisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of the
desolate lives lived in this paradise. This was a fact she had not noticed
as a child, accepting the country people as she did all other
incomprehensible elders. They had not seemed to her to differ noticeably
from her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk negligées on
wicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarmé, or from her
competent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer colony's social
life with firm hands. There was as yet no summer colony, this week in May.
Even the big hotel was not open. Virginia was lodged in the house of one
of the farmers. There was no element to distract her mind from the narrow,
unlovely lives of the owners of that valley of beauty.
They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the
miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were
absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse
dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their
parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to
rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longer
a child to ignore all this. It was an embittering, imprisoning thought
from which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of May
woods. She was a woman now, with a trained mind which took in the
saddening significance of these lives, not so much melancholy or tragic as
utterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored. They weighed on her heart as
she walked and drove about the lovely country they spoiled for her.
What a heavenly country it was! She compared it to similar valleys in
Switzerland, in Norway, in Japan, and her own shone out pre-eminent with a
thousand beauties of bold skyline, of harmoniously "composed" distances,
of exquisitely fairy-like detail of foreground. But oh! the wooden
packing-boxes of houses and the dreary lives they sheltered!
The Pritchard family, her temporary hosts, summed up for her the human
life of the valley. There were two children, inarticulate, vacant-faced
country children of eight and ten, out from morning till night in the
sunny, upland pastures, but who could think of nothing but how many quarts
of berries they had picked and what price could be exacted for them. There
was Gran'ther Pritchard, a doddering, toothless man of seventy-odd, and
his wife, a tall, lean, lame old woman with a crutch who sat all through
the mealtimes speechlessly staring at the stranger, with faded gray eyes.
There was Mr. Pritchard and his son Joel, gaunt Yankees, toiling with
fierce concentration to "get the crops in" after a late spring. Finally
there was Mrs. Pritchard, worn and pale, passing those rose-colored spring
days grubbing in her vegetable garden. And all of them silent, silent as
the cattle they resembled. There had been during the first few days of her
week's stay some vague attempts at conversation, but Virginia was soon
aware that they had not the slightest rudiments of a common speech.
A blight was on even those faint manifestations of the esthetic spirit
which they had not killed out of their bare natures. The pictures in the
house were bad beyond belief, and the only flowers were some petunias,
growing in a pot, carefully tended by Grandma Pritchard. They bore a mass
of blossoms of a terrible magenta, like a blow in the face to anyone
sensitive to color. It usually stood on the dining-table, which was
covered with a red cloth. "Crimson! Magenta! It is no wonder they are lost
souls!" cried the girl to herself.
On the last day of her week, even as she was trying to force down some
food at the table thus decorated, she bethought herself of her old haunt
of desolate peace on the mountainside. She pushed away from the table with
an eager, murmured excuse, and fairly ran out into the gold and green of
the forest, a paradise lying hard by the pitiable little purgatory of the
farmhouse. As she fled along through the clean-growing maple-groves,
through stretches of sunlit pastures, azure with bluets, through dark
pines, red-carpeted by last year's needles, through the flickering,
shadowy-patterned birches, she cried out to all this beauty to set her
right with the world of her fellows, to ease her heart of its burden of
disdainful pity.
But there was no answer.
She reached the deserted clearing breathless, and paused to savor its
slow, penetrating peace. The white birches now almost shut the house from
view; the barn had wholly disappeared. From the finely proportioned old
doorway of the house protruded a long, grayed, weather-beaten tuft of hay.
The last utilitarian dishonor had befallen it. It had not even its old
dignity of vacant desolation. She went closer and peered inside. Yes, hay,
the scant cutting from the adjacent old meadows, had been piled high in
the room which had been the gathering-place of the forgotten family life.
She stepped in and sank down on it, struck by the far-reaching view from
the window. As she lay looking out, the silence was as insistent as a
heavy odor in the air.
The big white clouds lay like stepping-stones in the sky's blue river,
just as when she was a child. Their silver-gleaming brightness blinded
her ... "_Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh ... warte nur ... balde ... ruhest
... du ..." she began to murmur, and stopped, awed by the immensity of
the hush about her. She closed her eyes, pillowed her head on her
upthrown arms, and sank into a wide, bright reverie, which grew
dimmer and vaguer as the slow changeless hours filed by.
She did not know if it were from a doze, or but from this dreamy haze that
she was wakened by the sound of voices outside the house, under the window
by which she lay. There were the tones of a stranger and those of old Mrs.
Pritchard, but now flowing on briskly with a volubility unrecognizable.
Virginia sat up, hesitating Were they only passing by, or stopping? Should
She show herself or let them go on? In an instant the question was settled
for her. It was too late. She would only shame them if they knew her
there. She had caught her own name. They were talking of her.
"Well, you needn't," said the voice of Mrs. Pritchard "You can just save
your breath to cool your porridge You can't get nothin' out'n her."
"But she's traveled 'round so much, seems's though ..." began the other
woman's voice.
"_Don't_ it?" struck in old Mrs. Pritchard assentingly, "But 'tain't so!"
The other was at a loss. "Do you mean she's stuck-up and won't answer
you?" Mrs. Pritchard burst into a laugh, the great, resonant good-nature
of which amazed Virginia. She had not dreamed that one of these sour,
silent people could laugh like that. "No, _land_ no, Abby! She's as
soft-spoken as anybody could be, poor thing! She ain't got nothin' to say.
That's all. Why, I can git more out'n any pack-peddler that's only been
from here to Rutland and back than out'n her ... and she's traveled all
summer long for five years, she was tellin' us, and last year went around
the world."
"Good land! Think of it!" cried the other, awestruck. "China! An' Afriky!
An' London!"
"That's the way we felt! That's the reason we let her come. There ain't no
profit in one boarder, and we never take boarders, anyhow. But I thought
'twould be a chance for the young ones to learn something about how
foreign folks lived." She broke again into her epic laugh. "Why, Abby,
'twould ha' made you die to see us the first few days she was there,
tryin' to get somethin' out'n her. Italy, now ... had she been there? 'Oh,
yes, she _adored_ Italy!'" Virginia flushed at the echo of her own
exaggerated accent. "Well, we'd like to know somethin' about Italy. What
did they raise there? Honest, Abby, you'd ha' thought we'd hit her side
th' head. She thought and she _thought_, and all she could say was
'olives,' Nothing else? 'Well, she'd never noticed anything else ... oh,
yes, lemons.' Well, that seemed kind o' queer vittles, but you can't never
tell how foreigners git along, so we thought maybe they just lived off'n
olives and lemons; and Joel he asked her how they raised 'em, and if they
manured heavy or trusted to phosphate, and how long the trees took before
they began to bear, and if they pruned much, and if they had the same
trouble we do, come harvest time, to hire hands enough to git in th'
crop."