Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring
He awoke early, refreshed and intensely alive. With the work done he
became conscious of a feeling of disassociation from the surroundings
in which he had so long been at home. Many words of the talkative
German were running in his mind from the night before. He was glad the
business was off his mind. He would now go the pleasant journey, and
think on the way.
His trunks were ready for the car; and before he went down-stairs his
hand-bag was packed, and the preparations for the start completed.
When, after his breakfast, he read the telegram announcing that the car
had been delayed twenty-four hours in Chicago, he was bored by the
thought that he must pass another day in New York. He was eager now to
be off, and the time would hang heavily.
He tried to recall some forgotten detail of the business that might
serve to occupy him. But the finishing had been thorough.
He ran over in his mind the friends with whom he could spend the time
agreeably. He could recall no one he cared to see. He had no longer an
interest in the town or its people.
He went aimlessly out on to Broadway in the full flood of a spring
morning, breathing the fresh air hungrily. It turned his thought to
places out of the grime and clamour of the city; to woods and fields
where he might rest and feel the stimulus of his new plans. He felt
aloof and sufficient unto himself.
He swung on to an open car bound north, and watched without interest
the early quick-moving workers thronging south on the street, and
crowding the cars that passed him. At Forty-second Street, he changed
to a Boulevard car that took him to the Fort Lee Ferry at One Hundred
and Twenty-fifth Street.
Out on the shining blue river he expanded his lungs to the clean, sweet
air. Excursion boats, fluttering gay streamers, worked sturdily up the
stream. Little yachts, in fresh-laundered suits of canvas, darted
across their bows or slanted in their wakes, looking like white
butterflies. The vivid blue of the sky was flecked with bits of broken
fleece, scurrying like the yachts below. Across the river was a
high-towering bank of green inviting him over its summit to the
languorous freshness beyond.
He walked off the boat on the farther side and climbed a series of
steep wooden stairways, past a tiny cataract that foamed its way down
to the river. When he reached the top he walked through a stretch of
woods and turned off to the right, down a cool shaded road that wound
away to the north through the fresh greens of oak and chestnut.
He was entranced at once by the royal abandon of spring, this wondrous
time of secret beginnings made visible. The old earth was become as a
young wife from the arms of an ardent spouse, blushing into new life
and beauty for the very joy of love. He breathed the dewy freshness,
and presently he whistled the "Spring Song" of Mendelssohn, that
bubbling, half-joyous, half-plaintive little prayer in melody.
He was well into the spirit of the time and place. His soul sang. The
rested muscles of his body and mind craved the resistance of obstacles.
He rejoiced. He had been wise to leave the city for the fresh,
unspoiled country--the city with all its mean little fears, its petty
immoralities, and its very trifling great concerns. He did not analyse,
more than to remember, once, that the not reticent German would approve
his mood. He had sought the soothing quiet with the unfailing instinct
of the wounded animal.
The mysterious green life in the woods at either side allured him with
its furtive pulsing. But he kept to the road and passed on. He was not
yet far enough from the town.
Some words from a little song ran in his mind as he walked:
"The naked boughs into green leaves slipped,
The longing buds into flowers tripped,
The little hills smiled as if they were glad,
The little rills ran as if they were mad.
"There was green on the earth and blue in the sky,
The chrysalis changed to a butterfly,
And our lovers, the honey-bees, all a-hum,
To hunt for our hearts began to come."
When he came to a village with an electric car clanging through it, he
skirted its borders, and struck off through a woodland toward the
river. Even the village was too human, too modern, for his early-pagan
mood.
In the woods he felt that curious thrill of stealth, that impulse to
cautious concealment, which survives in man from the remote days when
enemies beset his forest ways. On a southern hillside he found a
dogwood-tree with its blossomed firmament of white stars. In low, moist
places the violets had sprung through the thatch of leaves and were
singing their purple beauties all unheard. Birds were nesting, and
squirrels chattered and scolded.
Under these more obvious signs and sounds went the steady undertone of
life in root and branch and unfurling leaf--provoking, inciting, making
lawless whomsoever it thrilled.
He came out of the wood on to another road that ran not far from the
river, and set off again to the north along the beaten track.
In an old-fashioned garden in front of a small house a girl bent over a
flower bed, working with a trowel.
He stopped and looked at her over the palings. She was freshly pretty,
with yellow hair blown about her face under the pushed back sunbonnet
of blue. The look in her blue eyes was the look of one who had heard
echoes; who had awakened with the spring to new life and longings,
mysterious and unwelcome, but compelling.
She stood up when he spoke; her sleeves were turned prettily back upon
her fair round arms.
"Yes, the road turns to the left, a bit ahead."
She was blushing.
"You are planting flower seeds."
"Yes; so many flowers were killed by the cold last winter."
"I see; there must a lot of them have died here, but their souls didn't
go far, did they now?"
She went to digging again in the black moist earth. He lingered. The
girl worked on, and her blush deepened. He felt a lawless impulse to
vault the palings, and carry her off to be a flower for ever in some
wooded glade near by. He dismissed it as impracticable. His intentions
would probably be misconstrued.
"I hope your garden will thrive. It has a pretty pattern to follow."
"Thank you!"
He raised his hat and passed on, thinking; thinking of all the old dead
flowers, and their pretty souls that had gone to bloom in the heaven of
the maid's face.
Before the road turned to the left he found a path leading over to the
top of the palisade. There on a little rocky shelf, hundreds of feet
above the river, he lay a long time in the spring sun, looking over to
the farther shore, where the city crept to the south, and lost its
sharp lines in the smoky distance. There he smoked and gave himself up
to the moment. He was glad to be out of that rush. He could see matters
more clearly now--appraise values more justly. He was glad of
everything that had come. Above all, glad to go back and carry on that
big work of his father's--his father who had done so much to redeem the
wilderness--and incidentally he would redeem his own manhood.
It will be recalled that the young man frequently expressed himself
with regrettable inelegance; that he habitually availed himself,
indeed, of a most infelicitous species of metaphor. It must not be
supposed that this spring day in the spring places had reformed his
manner of delivery. When he chose to word his emotions it was still
done in a manner to make the right-spoken grieve. Thus, going back
toward the road, after reviewing his great plans for the future, he
spoke aloud: "I believe it's going to be a good game."
When he became hungry he thought with relief that he would not be
compelled to seek one of those "hurry-up" lunch places with its clamour
and crowd. What was the use of all that noise and crowding and piggish
hurry? A remark of the German's recurred to him:
"It is a happy man who has divined the leisure of eternity, so he feels
it, like what you say, 'in his bones.'"
When he came out on the road again he thought regretfully of the pretty
girl and her flower bed. He would have liked to go back and suggest
that she sing to the seeds as she put them to sleep in their earth
cradle, to make their awakening more beautiful.
But he turned down the road that led away from the girl, and when he
came to a "wheelman's rest," he ate many sandwiches and drank much
milk.
The face of the maid that served him had been no heaven for the souls
of dead flowers. Still she was a girl; and no girl could be wholly
without importance on such a day. So he thought the things he would
have said to her if matters had been different.
When he had eaten, he loafed off again down the road. Through the long
afternoon he walked and lazed, turning into strange lanes and by-roads,
resting on grassy banks, and looking far up. He followed Doctor von
Herzlich's directions, and, going off into space, reduced the earth,
watching its little continents and oceans roll toward him, and viewing
the antics of its queer inhabitants in fancy as he had often in fact
viewed a populous little ant-hill, with its busy, serious citizens.
Then he would venture still farther--away out into timeless space,
beyond even the starry refuse of creation, and insolently regard the
universe as a tiny cloud of dust.
When the shadows stretched in the dusky languor of the spring evening,
he began to take his bearings for the return. He heard the hum and
clang of an electric car off through a chestnut grove.
The sound disturbed him, bringing premonitions of the city's unrest. He
determined to stay out for the night. It was restful--his car would not
arrive until late the next afternoon--there was no reason why he should
not. He found a little wayside hotel whose weather-beaten sign was
ancient enough to promise "entertainment for man and beast."
"Just what I want," he declared. "I'm both of them--man and beast."
Together they ate tirelessly of young chickens broiled, and a green
salad, and a wonderful pie, with a bottle of claret that had stood back
of the dingy little bar so long that it had attained, at least as to
its label, a very fair antiquity.
This time the girl was pretty again, and, he at once discovered, not
indisposed to light conversation. Yet she was a shallow creature, with
little mind for the subtler things of life and the springtime. He
decided she was much better to look at than to talk to. With a just
appreciation of her own charms she appeared to pose perpetually before
an imaginary mirror, regaling him and herself with new postures,
tossing her brown head, curving her supple waist, exploiting her
thousand coquetries. He was pained to note, moreover, that she was more
than conscious of the red-cheeked youth who came in from the carriage
shed, whistling.
When the man and the beast had been appeased they sat out under a
blossomed apple-tree and smoked together in a fine spirit of amity.
He was not amazed when, in the gloom, he saw the red-cheeked youth with
both arms about the girl--nor was he shocked at detecting instantly
that her struggles were meant to be futile against her assailant's
might. The birds were mating, life was forward, and Nature loves to be
democratically lavish with her choicest secrets. Why not, then, the
blooming, full curved kitchen-maid and the red-cheeked boy-of-all-work?
He smoked and saw the night fall. The dulled bronze jangle of cow-bells
came soothingly to him. An owl called a little way off. Swallows
flashed by in long graceful flights. A bat circled near, indecisively,
as if with a message it hesitated to give. Once he heard the flute-like
warble of a skylark.
He was under the clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen
senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of
the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except
when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of
the house. That disturbed him to fierce longings--the clear, high
measure of a woman's laugh floating to him in the night. And once she
sang--some song common to her class. It moved him as her laugh did,
making him vibrate to her, as when a practised hand flutters the
strings of a harp. He was glad without knowing why when she stopped.
At ten o'clock he went in from under the peering little stars and fell
asleep in an ancient four-poster. He dreamed that he had the world, a
foot-ball, clasped to his breast, and was running down the field for a
gain of a hundred yards. Then, suddenly, in place of the world, it was
Avice Milbrey in his grasp, struggling frantically to be free; and
instead of behaving like a gentleman he flung both arms around her and
kissed her despite her struggles; kissed her time after time, until she
ceased to strive against him, and lay panting and helpless in his arms.