have attained it. But sometimes I look at them and wonder, Is it what
once they wanted? The Lady of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I
am not sure she will not some day have another; surely there are things
her hands might touch fairer even than roses. Lady Two has no story,
and is too hearty and happy to note the fact, but when I see her lift
in a strong brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember there are heads
even more golden and downy. Lady Three, cozily ensconced in her snug
old farmhouse, looks back into her homeless past, forward into her
unhoused future, fearless in the knowledge that whithersoever she goes
she carries with her a serene personality that will always be shaping
its whereabouts to fit it, but her eyes are bright with philosophies
that might have sent forth sons and daughters to splendid living. Like
my three friends who have found quiet in the morning call of the sun, in
the coming of the rain on a thirsting flower-bed, on all the big little
concerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on the good green peace of the
universe--a universe which must have some stout principle of growth
spiritual beneath its seeming waste of mortal energies, in order that I
may not question why it is that the farm feminine is not, as it might
have been, the farm masculine, the farm infantine.
XVI
_A Little Girl and Her Grandmother_
I am always sorry for children who have never known what it is to have
a grandmother and a grandfather and an old mountain farm to visit,
far away from everywhere. A little girl I once knew had all three.
Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever seen. She was
tall and stout, with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands, as they
stroked the little girl’s head on her shoulder, were smooth and soft.
The grandmother’s eyes were blue and full of mischief and fun and love.
When she laughed she shook all over so that nobody looking at her could
help laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally serious. The
grandmother’s cheeks were a soft pink, and her hair was black, faintly
silvered. She wore it parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was
crimped. On Sundays, too, she wore her black grenadine, but on other
days her dress was blue gingham with a long white apron.
The grandmother lived on a farm so steep that it seemed always to
be sliding down the mountain into the valley below. At the back of
the house were a few acres of cleared space, and then beyond this the
stretches of mountain woods. From these woods you could hear the call
of the whip-poor-wills in the evenings, and there were wildcats and
bears there, too, perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely. The farm had been
a wild sort of place until the grandmother took hold of it and tamed
it. She had them build a line of white fence palings between the house
and the grass-grown mountain road. She would have the porch trimmed
with clematis, and they had to build her a grape arbor, too, and swing
a hammock under it. Above the whitewashed fence a row of sunflowers
nodded, and within was a line of sweet-peas. In front of the house were
two long flower-beds, bordered with mignonette. In one was heliotrope,
in the other flowering red geraniums. There were other flower-beds, too,
wherever the grandmother could find a place for them, and in one was
a tall plant of lemon verbena. The grandmother was always plucking a
leaf of this and crushing it, and then clapping her fragrant hand over
the little girl’s nose. Such fun they had with the flowers, snipping
and weeding and watering, their two gossipy sunbonnets close together!
Whatever the grandmother was doing, the little girl was always at her
heels, except when she was tagging after her grandfather.
All through her childhood the little girl used to make long visits at
the farm. She was a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grandmother
said she was “high-strung,” but her mother and the little girl herself
called it just plain “naughty.” At any rate, she was always losing her
temper, and then crying for hours over the sin of it. She worried over
everything that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything that
might happen by night, and was always flying from her bed in terror of
the dark. At last, when the little girl’s cheeks would grow so thin, and
her eyes so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits’ end what to
do with her, she would say to the father: “We must send Margie down to
mother.”
Now the little girl’s father, who was a minister, had very little money,
and the grandmother had less, but somehow they would do without things
and do without things until they got the little girl safely off to the
old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly that her mother
hardly knew her.
The first of these visits was when Margie was so little that she
would have been a baby if there hadn’t been another baby at home. She
remembers only one happening of that visit--riding high on the hay
wagon, she and her grandmother, while her grandfather drove the mules.
Margie thinks now that perhaps her grandmother did not enjoy that ride,
for hay is hot and prickly, but whatever the little girl wanted to do,
that the grandmother did. Another incident of that first visit her
grandmother used to tell the little girl afterwards. The little girl
always wanted to help her grandfather in all his work, and often she
was much in the way. Sometimes when there was hoeing that must be done,
the grandfather would try to slip away unnoticed; then that tease of a
grandmother would point out to the little girl how the grandfather’s
overalls were just disappearing around the corner of the house, and
the little girl would snatch up her sunbonnet and her fire shovel, and
run after, crying: “Wait for me, grandpa!” Then she would stand in the
furrow right in front of him and pound away with her shovel, so hot and
earnest that the grandfather had nothing to do but stand and laugh at
her, and down in the doorway the grandmother, watching them, laughed,
too, because she was teasing the grandfather and pleasing the little
girl.
Another visit came the summer when Margie was seven. Her father was
going to Convocation, and so could take her with him and drop her off at
the grandmother’s station. Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new
sailor suit. She was so excited all the way that she did not talk at
all, and would not touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the window,
she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather holding the reins and
her grandmother waiting on the platform. Her grandmother lifted her up
in her arms, doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her
over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to be lifted and
carried. Seated between her grandparents, while her grandmother held
her hat and the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk
bumped along at the back, all Margie’s worries fell away from her--she
forgot she was a sinful child, she ceased to think that the babies were
doomed to drown in the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread
disease and die, that her father would be run over in crossing the
railroad track; and as for springing from her bed in fear, that night
and all the rest she slept so soundly that she never woke at all.
Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother would open Margie’s trunk and
take out all the little garments and think them the prettiest ever seen,
because the little girl’s mother had made them every stitch. From the
little dresses the grandmother would select the very oldest, and then
lock all the others away again. Down at the village store she would buy
some coarse brown and white stockings, costing ten cents a pair. From
a corner behind the sewing-machine she would bring out the sunbonnet
she had stitched for Margie in the winter. It was blue check and had
pasteboard slats that came out when it was washed. Thus equipped, the
little girl might run free of the farm. She helped to feed the calves
and the chickens and the pigs; she wiped the dishes for Minnie, the
little Dutch maid, in order that Minnie might be sooner ready to play
in the haymow with her in the long sultry afternoons through which the
locusts shrilled; she went huckleberrying with her grandfather, pushing
far into the mountain woods, always treading warily because of the
rattlers, and coming home with a face smirched with purple under the
sunbonnet; she took long drives with her grandfather along strange,
still mountain roads. With him, too, she tried milking: the cow-bells
tinkled through the dusk of the long shed, and the air was fragrant
with the hay and the steaming milk-pails, and the little girl tried
with all her might, but usually she only succeeded in sending a fine
stream into her grandfather’s eye. On indoor days Margie would draw
her little red rocker up beside her grandmother’s knee and listen to
stories. The stories were all about mysterious and unknown relatives,
Cousin Letty This and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah Something Else.
Much of it the little girl did not understand at all, yet somehow she
liked listening to stories, snuggled against her grandmother’s knee,
better than anything else in the long, blithe days, and the little girl
felt sleepy very early here on the farm--she that was such a sleepless
midget at home.
After supper, while the light was still clear, her grandmother would
undress her and put on her nightgown: then, when her hair was combed and
her teeth brushed and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl
in the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big rocking-chair on
the front porch. There the grandmother would croon old songs while the
little girl’s head drowsed against her shoulder, and the summer twilight
stole upon them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will would sound out
from the woods, or the roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the
road would rustle and flap their wings, and sometimes the white moon
would come gliding up the sky, seen dreamily through the clematis bloom.
As the little girl grew older she could not go to the farm so often,
partly because she took a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her
mother needed her at home; but always, when she did go, she and her
grandmother had the same old good times together, and Margie was still
happier there on the old mountain farm than anywhere else in the world.
She seemed to love her grandmother better now that she was old enough
to think about her more. The grandmother had some funny ways. For one
thing she would never sit in a straight chair at table, but always in
a rocker. She would eat a little, and then sit back and rock a little,
and sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and chatty, she
would fall asleep while she rocked, but she would never admit that she
had napped a minute, not she. Try as you might, you could never get the
grandmother a present that she would keep. She loved dainty things, but
the prettier the gift, the more she would fall to thinking how much it
would please some one else, and so presently away it went. If the giver
chanced to find her out, she would hang her head and look much ashamed
of herself, but all the time her eyes would be roguish. All the family
teased her and she teased them. She would have walked miles for the sake
of a good joke on any one of them, but her fun was always tender. One
dearly loved joke she played every year. In October, when the mountains
were wonderful in the blue autumn weather and the tang of burning leaves
was in the air, a little family of Margie’s cousins used to come out
from their town house to the old farm for chestnuts. For days before
they came the grandmother and Minnie would gather every chestnut and put
away the treasure in a big bag. On the morning of the children’s coming,
the grandmother was always to be found scattering the hoarded chestnuts
in great handfuls everywhere. Later in the day, when the children were
shouting over the windfall, she would shake a threatening finger at the
grandfather and Minnie if they dared to chuckle.
After a while the little girl was quite grown up and had gone to
college, where she had acquired a bad habit of studying herself sick.
Once again her mother in desperation sent her to her grandmother. At the
station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting with a cot bed;
they laid the little girl on it and walked alongside up the mountain.
That morning the grandmother and Minnie had been over all that mile
of mountain road and had picked off every stone, so that the little
girl might feel no jarring. Margie thought that the back of her head
would never stop aching, but her grandmother nursed her and fed her and
rubbed her, and wrapped her up warm and put her out in the sunshine; she
told her that she must forget what the doctors had said, and that the
mountain air would cure her, and so after a while it did.
But there came a last visit. They found that for two years the
grandmother had been ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it
a secret as long as she could. They sent her little girl to her for
the last time. The grandmother would always stop moaning when Margie
came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself enough to sit up and
tell her stories. She liked to lie in the hammock and have Margie swing
her gently, and she would often send her down to the ferny spring for
a fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from the old cocoanut
drinking-cup, and almost always as she handed this back to Margie she
would say, “Have you ever tasted such good water as this?” and always
she was pleased when Margie answered, “No.”
One day Margie had to go away to her teaching. Her grandmother got up
from her couch and walked to the front door to bid her good-bye. They
said very little, and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked
back from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and the valley
and the circling mountains, at all the place she loved best in all the
world, she knew that she should never wish to see it again.
So the little girl’s visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a
beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the
first time, one may read a book over again. The little girl has been
grown up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and worried
and frightened she turns back the pages of her memory. She is sitting
on her grandmother’s lap on the porch in the summer twilight. Her
grandmother is singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the
clematis.
XVII
_The Wayfaring Woman_
Just when, for the first time, I was fearing lest some day the
wizard-light might fade from my hilltops, because I had climbed them so
often; lest some day people’s eyelids might cease to be doors flashing
upon mystery, because I had seen so many secrets; and lest, sadder
still, I might wake up some morning and find that my comrade-soul had
forgotten to pipe me on to the new adventure of the new morning,--just
when I was fearing these things, I bought a pair of rubber boots!
They are real boots, real as all masculine things are real. They have
straps, a new thing to me in footgear. They are deep and cavernous,
so that I sink to the knee, and in them I am armored like a man, but
yet a woman. Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my new-bought rubber boots,
of adjustment to a man’s free-hearted adventuring. If I am to tramp
alone, let me be valiantly shod like a man, though a woman at heart,
for is not all the world mine for the walking it? Who knows what new
fun may be abroad for me now, in my rubber boots? I was made for
life’s out-of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all
weathers, and indeed I have walked it in many, plucking by my homely
hillpaths thoughts that are wayside flowers along a subtler way.
I have gazed at my circling hills in many changing lights. I have seen
them on a moon-flooded summer evening lie shoulder to shoulder asleep
about the broad valley pastures, while the tree-shadows wavered black
against white farmhouses, asleep, too; and nothing made any noise except
the brook beneath my wayside bridge, and that, a merry brown human brook
by day, went singing in the moon an elfin chant it had forgotten that it
knew. I have seen my hills deepest blue at the skyline, and below all
ablaze, beneath the racing white clouds of October, when more than at
any other time the winding roads bewitch my feet, and every blackberry
thicket and slope and fence-row is flaunting its banners in my eyes;
yet I cannot stop to gaze, for the air is of so keen a blueness; I must
walk, run, fly, because of the urgency of October in my toes.
But in the spring one’s step slackens, and one stops to loiter and look
at the green willows that twist with the wavering course of the swift
muddy river; at the rosy mist on the maple-boughs, at sunny blue wings
that flash against bare branches. In the spring the most insistent
walker must pause by an arbutus bank. Last year’s leaves upon it are
still rimmed with frost and snow, and one’s fingers grow red, poking
beneath for treasure. But what largess of arbutus our humblest wayside
banks hereabouts can yield, arbutus great-petaled, deep-pink, setting
free what prisoned fragrance!
I have tramped my climbing roads in winter-time, too, on those days
of winter when the mercury sinks to the zero point, when the snow
crunches loud beneath my heels, and the sun hangs high and cold, and
the spangle glistens on crusted fields. But heretofore there have been
days of winter when I have felt myself held within doors, days of slush
and ooze, when the sky broods low, and the air is blind with great wet
flakes; yet these were the very days when the gypsy wind came rattling
the window-sash and piping of new wonders of grayness and of whiteness
out there upon the hills.
I who have packed my wanderer’s wallet with the gentle secrets of summer
nights, of springtime hillsides, and wintry sunshine, I who have always
tramped to the call of a lonely road, should I turn craven stay-at-home
when life’s wild weather draws my feet hillward through grim slush and
sleet? Are there not new secrets waiting on the stormy hills? I am not
afraid! I have put on rubber boots.
In all this countryside I am the only woman who walks. Highroads and
by-paths and woodways are mine alone, for here solitude is safe and
cheery for the woman who goes uncompanioned. I pass by unmolested,
but not unhailed. Happily, I have reached the age when men greet me
with level comrade eyes, and pass me merrily the time of day; at least
the genial old codgers of our region do. The men of my home hamlet of
Littleville are a bit proud of my pedestrian prowess, and if they meet
me wandering far will draw rein to twinkle down and rally me: “Guess
you’re lost this time sure, ain’t you?”
The strangers I meet rarely pass me in churlish silence. I have had a
man, never before seen, bend down from his high seat, his face all one
pucker of concern, while he shouted to me in a high windy voice, “Hi,
there, you’re losing a hat-pin!” His over-spread relief as I adjusted it
was but one instance of the intimacy ruling within the sweeping circle
of hills that rim Littleville like a cup. We are no strangers here, we
comrades of the road.
Yet in my walking I must often pay the penalty of being unique, of being
an anomaly in country conventions. They are kind, our rural men-folk,
but I think the kindest, passing me, make a swift comparison between
me and their kitchen-keeping women. In this inarticulate comparison
there is a boyish flash of sympathy that I should find the out-of-doors
the same jolly thing men do; but more, there is distrust of one who
obviously enjoys the zest of her own feet as much as their wives enjoy
jogging through life beside a comfortable husband behind a comfortable
horse. Possibly the thoughts of rural men-folk are not so different from
the thoughts of all other men-folk when they pass the woman who walks.
Whatever the mental comment attached to the gaze, the eyes that meet
mine are quite as often astounded as amused. If this is evident even
when I trudge in flooding sunshine, astonishment becomes irrepressible
when I am seen abroad in snow and sleet. “By gosh! pretty hard walking
you got, ain’t you?”
Foot-fast in slush, I pipe back, “But I like it. I have on rubber boots!”
Such the accost from vehicles not facing in my direction; but when a
horse that goes my way is drawn up, and I decline the proffered seat;
knee-deep in slush, refuse to get in! then the driver’s face expresses
such commiseration as I never expected to feel applied to my inoffensive
person. Plainly I see that it is not my drabbled skirts he is sorry for,
it is my addled wits. Walking country roads in ill weather has taught
me exactly how a lunatic must feel. It is said that the crazy have a
certain look in the eye; of experience I can affirm that so also have
those who gaze upon the crazy.
For the passing instant, as I meet that profound pity in mild, masculine
orbs, I do doubt my own sanity, and wonder if perhaps this glorious
freedom of the wild, wet weather is quite the sensible thing it seemed
when I set out; for it is the look in other people’s eyes that gives us
our own spiritual orientation. Lunacy is a purely relative term. There
are places where women may walk and hardly be glanced at for so doing,
just as, perhaps, within his own cage-walls, the Bedlamite may seem to
himself a normal human being. Also, perhaps, the lunatics, like me, have
their silent chuckle; knowing, like me, that they have their inward fun,
although the numskull sane can’t see it. I hope so, for I would fain
think some sunny thought of the poor brainsick folk.
It is not given to my friends of the highway, sensible men creatures
on wheels, any more than to their wives, snug at home in dry domestic
shoes, to know the joy of my walk through the swift, wet snowflakes. On
and up I go, never meaning to go home by the same way I have come. What
lover of the road ever does that?
The clinging snow has enfolded all things. Every tree stands with white,
shrouded branches. The berry thickets are softly furred with white.
The dusky gray aisles of the roadside woods die to blackness in the
near distance. The little brooks go tinkling beneath a thatch of snow
bristling with high grass blades. There is almost no color. Even the
bronze of oak leaves is veiled by white mist. The world is all white and
gray, and in the distance faintly blue. The fast-falling snow blurs all
familiar outlines strangely, so that I hardly believe those dreamy roofs
down there belong to humdrum Littleville.
There is strange, muffled silence. I am half afraid of the woods; they
have grown unearthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of the snow
that drops from the branches. Gray-white, silent mystery,--and I should
never have known or seen it, had I not laughed at life’s wild weather,
and trudged forth to it in rubber boots, all alone.
Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside groves, of busy secret
streams and homely fields, always the human aspect of the road engages
the woman who tramps with joy at the heart. In summer and winter, as I
go, I pass the brown milk-wagons, plodding, monotonous, starting forth
from all the circling farms and converging to the milk station. The
drivers have always dull or far-away faces, for it is always the same
road, the same rattling cans at their backs, the same shaggy, jogging
flanks before them.
Almost always, somewhere on my journey, I meet the rural mail-man. The
bobbing yellow dome of his narrow wagon is always easily descried in
the distance. The mailman knows my tramp-habits well, and the smile
from his little blinking pane never fails me. Another familiar vehicle
is the school carryall, which nowadays picks up all the human contents
of one of our district schools and carries them down to Littleville for
instruction. The school wagon is driven by a jovial grandsire, and it is
always crowded to overflowing with small, merry people who hail me. I
rarely meet any folk on foot, although occasionally a leggined huntsman
slips noiselessly across the road from one grove to another, while a
hound sniffs to right and left of his path.