summer have died away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet broken
over the barriers of the north. Above my head stretches a fanlike
branch of witch-hazel, its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twisted
flowers just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before its yellow
straps have burned crisp and brown. But let it fall. It must melt
again; for as long as these pale embers glow the icy hands of winter
shall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world.
And so I dream. The woods are at my back, the level meadow and wide
fields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of
oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy air
glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the
sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a
glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind
were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles
through the slanting reeds of the sun.
It is not the wind that weaves; it is a multitude of small spiders.
Here is one close to my face, out at the tip of a slender grass-stem,
holding on with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hind
legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. The threads stream and sway
and lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage
till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the little
aeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through the sky.
Long before we dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting the
clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as
his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the meadow sea.
Who taught him navigation? By what compass is he steering? And where
will he come to port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard-hack on
the other side of the pasture; or perhaps some wild air-current will
sweep him over the woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him a
hundred miles away. No matter. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and
there is no port where the wind never blows.
Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except in this soft and sunny
weather. The autumn seeds are sailing too--the pitching parachutes of
thistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachts
under sail--a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almost
cottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thick
in the clearing.
As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away. One
cannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower
crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, of
fields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all full
of song as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the seeds are done.
The autumn wind goeth forth to sow, and with the most lavish of hands.
He wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs them, rounds them,
and angles them; they fly and fall, they sink and swim, they stick and
shoot, they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake of
a chance to grow. They even lie in wait for me, plucking me by the
coat-sleeve, fastening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until I
have walked with them into my very garden. The cows are forced to
carry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them on
their foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or wayward
breeze would go. Not a corner within the horizon but will get its
needed seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field to
the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again with
the coming spring.
The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, most of them having
already gone. Soon I shall hear the bugle notes of the last guard as
the Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight for the South. And
yonder stands the fodder, brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely
tied against the beating rains. How can one be melancholy when one
knows the meaning of the fodder, when one is able to find in it his
faith in the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wisdom which has
been built into the round of the year?
To him who lacks this faith and understanding let me give a serene
October day in the woods. Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can
get a large view of earth and sky. "One seems to get nearer to nature
in the early spring days," says Mr. Burroughs. I think not, not if by
nearer you mean closer to the heart and meaning of things. "All
screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she
is not hidden by verdure and foliage." That is true; yet for most of
us her lips are still dumb with the silence of winter. One cannot come
close to bare, cold earth. There is only one flat, faded expression on
the face of the fields in March; whereas in October there is a settled
peace and sweetness over all the face of Nature, a fullness and a
non-withholding in her heart that makes communication natural and
understanding easy.
The sap is sinking in the trees, the great tides of life have turned,
but so slowly do they run these soft and fragrant days that they seem
almost still, as at flood. A blue jay is gathering acorns overhead,
letting one drop now and then to roll out of sight and be planted under
the mat of leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into and through
the trees, talking quietly among themselves as they search for food,
moving all the while--and to a fixed goal, the far-off South.
Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field; the odor of ripened fox
grapes is brought with a puff of wind from across the pasture; the
smell of mint, of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the sun.
These are not the odors of death; but the fragrance of life's very
essence, of life ripened and perfected and fit for storing till another
harvest comes. And these flitting warblers, what are they but another
sign of promise, another proof of the wisdom which is at the heart of
things? And all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and creeper,
of burning berries on dogwood and ilex and elder--this sunset of the
seasons--but the preparation for another dawn?
If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, if one would be pressed
to her beating heart, if one would feel the mother in the soul of
things, let these October days find him in the hills, or where the
river makes into some vast salt marsh, or underneath some ancient tree
with fields of corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that reach and
round themselves along the rim of the sky.
The sun circles warm above me; and up against the snowy piles of cloud
a broad-winged hawk in lesser circles wheels and flings its piercing
cry far down to me; a fat, dozy woodchuck sticks his head out and eyes
me kindly from his burrow; and close over me, as if I too had grown and
blossomed there, bends a rank, purple-flowered ironweed. We understand
each other; we are children of the same mother, nourished at the same
abundant breast, the weed and I, and the woodchuck, and the wheeling
hawk, and the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes against the
sky--I am brother to them all. And this is home, this earth and
sky--these fruitful fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed and
river flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for no fairer home, none
larger, none of more abundant or more golden corn. If aught is
wanting, if just a tinge of shadow mingles with the rowan-scented haze,
it is the early-falling twilight, the thought of my days, how short
they are, how few of them find me with the freedom of these October
fields, and how soon they must fade into November.
No, the thought of November does not disturb me. There is one glory of
the sun and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars;
for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also are the
months and seasons. And if I watch closely I shall see that not only
are the birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their winter
lodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds putting on their thick, furry
coats--life everywhere preparing for the cold. I need to take the same
precaution,--even in my heart. I will take a day out of October, a day
when the woods are aflame with color, when the winds are so slow that
the spiders are ballooning, and lying where I can see them ascending
and the parachute seeds go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes are
opened to see larger and plainer things go by--the days with the round
of labor until the evening; the seasons with their joyous waking, their
eager living; their abundant fruiting, and then their sleeping--for
they must needs sleep. First the blade, then the ear, after that the
full corn in the ear, and after that the field of fodder. If so with
the corn and the seasons, why not so with life? And what of it all
could be fairer or more desirable than its October?--to lie and look
out over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut and shocked against
the winter with my own hands!
[Illustration: Going back to town]
XV
GOING BACK TO TOWN
"Labor Day, and school lunches begin to-morrow," She said, carefully
drying one of the "Home Comforts" that had been growing dusty on an
upper shelf since the middle of June.
She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the four boys and one for
me) on the back of the stove and stood looking a moment at them.
"Are you getting tired of spreading us bread and butter?" I asked.
She made no reply.
"If you don't put us up our comforts this year, how are we going to
dispose of all that strawberry jam and currant jelly?"
"I am not tired of putting up lunches," she answered. "I was just
wondering if this year we ought not to go back to town. Four miles
each way for the boys to school, and twenty each way for you. Are n't
we paying a pretty high price for the hens and the pleasures of being
snowed in?"
"An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly.
"And we 've paid it now these dozen winters running. Let's go into
Boston and take that suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last fall
in Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of the Avenue and the railroad
tracks. The boys can count freight cars until they are exhausted, and
watch engines from their windows night and day."
"It isn't a light matter," she went on. "And we can't settle it by
making it a joke. You need to be near your work; I need to be nearer
human beings; the children need much more rest and freedom than these
long miles to school and these many chores allow them."
"You 're entirely right, my dear, and this time we 'll do it. Our good
neighbor here will take the cow; I 'll give the cabbages away, and send
for 'Honest Wash' Curtis to come for the hens."
"But look at all this wild-grape jelly!" she exclaimed, turning to an
array of forty-four little garnet jars which she had just covered with
hot paraffin against the coming winter.
"And the thirteen bushels of potatoes," I broke in. "And the
apples--there are going to be eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwins
this year. And--"
But it never comes to an end--it never has yet, for as soon as we
determine to do it, we feel that we can or not, just as we please.
Simply deciding that we will move in yields us such an instant and
actual city sojourn that we seem already to have been and are now
gladly getting back to the country again.
So here we have stayed summer and winter, knowing that we ought to go
back nearer my work so that I can do more of it; and nearer the center
of social life so we can get more of it--life being pretty much lost
that is not spent in working, or going, or talking! Here we have
stayed even through the winters, exempt from public benefits, blessing
ourselves, every time it snows on Saturday, that we are here and not
there for our week ends, here within the "tumultuous privacy" of the
storm and our own roaring fireplace, with our own apples and popcorn
and books and selves; and when it snows on Monday wishing the weather
would always temper itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of
Mullein Hill--its length of back country road and automobile.
For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you give
it. Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neighbor
Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, as
indeed he is, his sense of safety on the way, the absolute certainty
(so far as there can be human certainty) of his arriving sometime,
being compensation enough for the loss of those sensations of speed
induced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the
automobile.
Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the great
hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is
seated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myself
rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have
started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself
that time wholly? Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it. The
most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going
around the corner ahead.
Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here into
Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough
away to save a man from all that passes along the road. The wind, too,
bloweth where it listeth, and when there is infection on it, you can't
escape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely. And once the sporulating
speed germs get into your system, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you,
their multiplying and bursting into the blood occurring regularly,
accompanied by a chill at two cylinders and followed by a fever for
four; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just like
malaria!
We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He has instead a "stavin'"
good mare by the name of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago,
from fast stock, as you would know if you held the cultivator behind
her. When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come with
her to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort her
into remembering that the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that
a row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard highways hurt
Bill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays takes every automobile's dust, and
none too sweetly either.
"Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the end of a row, "why
don't you get an automobile?"
"I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; but
I don't need a car much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious
greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with the
traces and the teeth of the harrow. "Besides, they 're skittish,
nervous things compared with a hoss. What I 'd like is something
neither one nor t'other--a sort of cross between an auto and Bill."
"Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, "with a cultivator attachment?
It would n't step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, and I think
it would beat Bill on the road."
There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off down another row, with Jonas
saying:--
"Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me."
And for me, too; yet there is no denying that conditions have changed,
that a multitude of new ills have been introduced into the social
organism by the automobile, and except in the deep drifts of winter,
the Ford car comes nearer curing those ills than any other anti-toxin
yet discovered.
But here are the drifts still; and here is the old question of going
back to the city to escape them. I shall sometimes wish we had gone
back as I start out on a snowy, blowy morning; but never at night as I
turn back--there is that difference between going to the city and going
home. I often think the trip in is worth while for the sake of the
trip out, such joy is it to pull in from the black, soughing woods to
the cheer of the house, stamping the powdery snow off your boots and
greatcoat to the sweet din of welcomes that drown the howling of the
wind outside.
Once last winter I had to walk from the station. The snow was deep and
falling steadily when I left the house in the morning, with increasing
wind and thickening storm all day, so that my afternoon train out was
delayed and dropped me at the station long after dark. The roads were
blocked, the snow was knee-deep, the driving wind was horizontal, and
the whirling ice particles like sharp sand, stinging, blinding as I
bent to the road.
I went forward leaning, the drag in my feet overcome by the pull of the
level wind on my slant body. Once through the long stretch of woods I
tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost my bearings, stumbled into
a ditch, and for a moment got utterly confused with the black of the
night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering hand of the wind on my
mouth.
Then I sat down where I was to pull myself together. There might be
danger in such a situation, but I was not really cold--not cool enough.
I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, by a frontal attack
instead of on the enemy's flank.
Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full force of the sweeping
gale, and here I realized for the first time that this was the great
storm of the winter, one of the supreme passages of the year, and one
of the glorious physical fights of a lifetime.
On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast,
frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the
wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott
and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very
poles! Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination!
The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose! A living
atom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world! A human
mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmost
shore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God can
follow!
It is not what a man does, but what he lives through doing it. Life
may be safer, easier, longer, and fuller of possessions in one place
than another. But possessions do not measure life, nor years, nor
ease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham hills in winter is wretchedly
remote at times, but nothing happens to me all day long in Boston to be
compared for a moment with this experience here in the night and snow.
I never feel the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness of the
world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the fearful majesty of such a
winter storm.
As the far-flung lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the
drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that
primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung
myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night
and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged
myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice of the storm a
mighty song within my soul.
This happened, as I say, _once_ last winter, and of course she said we
simply ought _not_ to live in such a place in winter; and of course, if
anything exactly like that should occur every winter night, I should
have to move into the city whether I liked city storms or not. One's
life is, to be sure, a consideration, but fortunately for life all the
winter days out here are not so magnificently ordered as this, except
at dawn each morning, and at dusk, and at midnight when the skies are
set with stars.
But there is a largeness to the quality of country life, a freshness
and splendor as constant as the horizon and a very part of it.
Take a day anywhere in the year: that day in March--the day of the
first frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall--the
day of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day in
August--the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumn
meet--_these_, together with the days of June, and more especially that
particular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, when
everything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pond
are moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay--the
day when spring and summer meet!
Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere in the calendar from the
rainy day in February when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the day
of floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets of wild lettuce and
silky-sailed fireweed on the golden air. The big soft clouds are
sailing their wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, the
chickadees and kinglets linger with you in your sheltered hollow
against the hill--you and they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep
before there breaks upon you the wrath of the North.
But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy day any nearer perfect
than that day when
"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
Arrives the snow"--
or the blizzard?
But going back to town, as she intimated, concerns the children quite
as much as me. They travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of
it on foot and part of it by street car--and were absent one day last
year when the telephone wires were down and we thought there would be
no school because of the snow. They might not have missed that one day
had we been in the city, and I must think of that when it comes time to
go back. There is room for them in the city to improve in spelling and
penmanship too, vastly to improve. But they could n't have half so
much fun there as here, nor half so many things to do, simple,
healthful, homely, interesting things to do, as good for them as books
and food and sleep--these last things to be had here, too, in great
abundance.
What could take the place of the cow and hens in the city? The hens
are Mansie's (he is the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night after
night last winter I would climb the Hill to see the barn lighted, and
in the shadowy stall two little human figures--one squat on an upturned
bucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held between his knees,
lodged perilously under the cow upon a half-peck measure; the other
little human figure quietly holding the cow's tail.
No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed--this is _business_ here in
the stall,--but as the car stops behind the scene, Babe calls--
"Hello, Father!"
"Hello, Babe!"
"Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, butting into the old
cow's flank. "You go right in, we 'll be there. She has n't kicked
but once!"
Perhaps that is n't a good thing for those two little boys to
do--watering, feeding, brushing, milking the cow on a winter night in
order to save me--and loving to! Perhaps that is n't a good thing for
me to see them doing, as I get home from the city on a winter night!
But I am a sentimentalist and not proof at all against two little boys
milking, who are liable to fall into the pail.
Meantime the two middlers had shoveled out the road down to the
mail-box on the street so that I ran up on bare earth, the very wheels
of the car conscious of the love behind the shovels, of the speed and
energy it took to get the long job done before I should arrive.
"How did she come up?" calls Beebum as he opens the house door for me,
his cheeks still glowing with the cold and exercise.
"Did we give you wide enough swing at the bend?" cries Bitsie, seizing
the bag of bananas.
"Oh, we sailed up--took that curve like a bird--didn't need
chains--just like a boulevard right into the barn!"
"It's a fearful night out, is n't it?" she says, taking both of my
hands in hers, a touch of awe, a note of thankfulness in her voice.
"Bad night in Boston!" I exclaim. "Trains late, cars stalled--streets
blocked with snow. I 'm mighty glad to be out here a night like this."
"Woof! Woof!"--And Babe and Pup are at the kitchen door with the pail
of milk, shaking themselves free from snow.
"Where is Mansie?" his mother asks.
"He just ran down to have a last look at his chickens."
We sit down to dinner, but Mansie does n't come. The wind whistles
outside, the snow sweeps up against the windows,--the night grows
wilder and fiercer.
"Why doesn't Mansie come?" his mother asks, looking at me.
"Oh, he can't shut the hen-house doors, for the snow. He 'll be here
in a moment."
The meal goes on.
"Will you go out and see what is the matter with the child?" she asks,
the look of anxiety changing to one of alarm on her face.
As I am rising there is a racket in the cellar and the child soon comes
blinking into the lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, his
cheeks blazing, his eyes afire. He slips into his place with just a
hint of apology about him and reaches for his cup of fresh, warm milk.
He is twelve years old.
"What does this mean, Mansie?" she says.
"Nothing."
"You are late for dinner. And who knows what had happened to you out
there in the trees a night like this. What were you doing?"