story. There beside that wind-rocked cupola is some curious mechanism.
For what purpose? To lift water to a roof-tank? To catch the lightning?
To send afloat an airship? Crude, clumsy, aspirant, a farm-boy’s dream!
I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road. A door flings open and
a man and a woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed me. The woman’s
face is set in impotent hate, the man’s mouth is wried with cursing;
and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness a mere passing
blight. Man and wife! Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went driving
gayly back from the parson’s, his arm about her ribboned waist, and
posies flaunting in her hat and in her cheeks--once!
It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond the doors to pity
often, but to envy rarely. It is in the nature of things that we cannot
envy, for those things we might covet are precisely those that come
spilling out of door and window to bless us, so that presently we are
bowing our heads and saying our bit of a grace for them, as being also
ours. Gentle old world, so constituted that a home can lock its door,
if it will, upon its sorrow, but can never hide its joy! I pass another
ragged farmhouse, and here the children in their homemade little duds
are trooping in from school. Again an open doorway, and in it a mother
wiping red hands upon her apron. The closing door shuts off sharply the
shrill voices that tell of the day’s events; but I have seen and heard,
and therefore I, too, possess.
At still another window-pane there is a bobbing baby-face. Such a
crowing, chuckling joy as is a year-old baby! What home could ever hide
him under a bushel? Strange mystery, that gives, withholds, inscrutably,
the heart’s desire of all of us, and yet ordains for us who trudge a
snow-cold path, that there shall be, even until we grow gray of soul and
feeble-footed, forever along our way, until the end, always behind the
panes we pass, the bobbing baby-faces! Other women’s babies? Does it
make so much difference whose they are, so long as they are sweet?
Another happiness it is ordained no woman shall keep unto herself. The
peace of a woman’s mouth when a good man loves her, that is another of
the things nothing can conceal, for sorrow may be leaden and secret
at the heart, but joy will always out and abroad. That is one of the
things we know, we wayfaring women.
Walks end with the dipping of the day. The winter dusk steals very
early over all the snowy whiteness. I have to peer to see Littleville’s
clustered roofs down there in the river-valley. Before I turn to wade
back down the drifted hill-road to the ruddy little home that lends me
harborage for the night, I stand still to look about me, through the
whirling flakes. See all around me hills I have not yet climbed! Think
of the untried roads that lead to them! What secret wizardry of new
woods, what elfin tinkle of new brooks, what new farmdoors, glimpsing
upon human mystery! Hills and the road for me, on and on! Just around
the turn what wonders wait, shall ever wait, for my rubber boots and me!
XVIII
_The Road That Talked_
I had walked that way a score of times and never seen that road, yet it
must have seen me and singled me out, or else it would never have peeped
about from its ambush of berry thicket and swamp and said, “Come.” I
was sturdily plodding the broad state road, for there is a state road
everywhere, white and useful, belonging to everybody,--to the lumbering
brown milk-wagons, to the bouncing muddy buckboards, to the motor-cycles
with their vibrant chugging, to the skimming automobiles. The state road
talks business all the time, incessant talk to blur the hearing; for all
good talk is half silence, and the only people who have anything to say
are the people who have listened. I was lonely for some one to talk to
when the little road beckoned.
The state road always chooses the riverway, always bustles along on the
level; how could one ever be friends with a road that never climbed a
hill? My feet were trudging the macadam, though growing more gypsyish
each moment, when the flash of a red leaf on a dusty bush, the rustle
of an unseen bird, and I saw the little road hailing me, and turned. It
was waiting for me, half revealed, half hidden, like a shy, would-be
friend, and at first, except for certain gypsy gleams along its
fence-rows, it was commonplace enough, it might have been anybody’s road.
At first, too, it went along discreetly, it turned and walked parallel
with the state thoroughfare, a little apart, it is true, but steadily
patterning on the manners of the highway, so that if a traveler had
chanced on it, he would have seen nothing unconventional. The little
road went along like that, and waited for its friends, but I had faith
to believe it would soon begin to climb, that climbing was what it
wanted of me. Imperceptibly at first it swerved from the parallel,
imperceptibly it mounted a little, so that presently, near as we still
were, we could look down at the village.
Then the little road began to talk, politely, pleasantly, but in no wise
pregnantly. Its language was meaningless at first, but with a lure, as
comrade eyes light to yours above lip-chat that does not need to mean
anything. We could go slowly, having all the morning to get acquainted.
Together the road and I looked down at the town through a screen of late
September leaves.
The place lay in mist, partly of the late-lingering fog, partly of the
fires that belong to these days when all the village rakes and burns,
and the youngsters tumble and romp and shriek in piles of leaves. All
outlines are blurred by a pearly haze, against which eddies the deeper
blue of chimney-smoke. Beyond the town the hills are dull gray against
the luminous gray of the sky, and between town and hill the river runs,
a shining silver sheet, with broken, deep-toned reflections near the
bank. Looking eastward through the flickering leaves, I watch the sun
steadily shining through, shredding the mist with fires of opal, in
gleams of blue and orange and amethyst. Down at the village they see
none of this, they know only that the fog lifts, while stubble-gardens,
and lawns, and house-fronts all turn brown and bare and commonplace
beneath the relentless sun. It is for me to see the opal fires lick up
the mist; such cheery little wonders of the road are all for me.
The road keeps silence, letting me listen to the village sounds,
musically fused at this brief distance; the shunting of a freight train
and its raucous whistle, the ringing of hammers on new scaffolding, the
shrilling of the saw-mill, the barking of dogs. All to herself, like
the shy one that she is, the little road murmurs her replies, in the
twittering of sparrows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in bared
branches, in the scratch and scud of dry leaves that race, the soft
thudding of a chestnut burr.
The sun is high, and the wind is blowing, and the comrade road is
waiting, genially postponing its sure self-revelation, but a-tiptoe
to be off now to the woods, where we may share our fun unmolested,
unsuspected. The little road is climbing now beyond mistaking. She is
stepping through the woods so familiarly that you might miss her trail
if you didn’t follow close, for she knows there is no fun in the woods
if you can’t get lost, can’t drop the pack of personality from your
shoulder, and grow one with brushwood shadow, or arched branch. When
the road said this to me, I began to listen to her for every word that
she might say. But stealing ever deeper into the woodland, my path is
not talking now, she is singing rather, she is dancing. Suddenly in
the deeps of the wood she opens up a long green alley of fairy turf,
and waits to see if I will share it with her and go scudding it like a
squirrel. The white state-way never dreamed that I could fly, but the
little friend-road knew. The road plays with me. Near the rut made by a
lumber team, she tosses a handful of wintergreen berries like flecks of
coral for me to garner, and lifts a sudden torch of scarlet oak against
some wood-recess black and deep as a cave. Every time she hears the
sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into still deeper shadow to be
alone with me. Looking to right and left you cannot see the open; the
only open is above, in the blue.
In the heart of the woods there is elfland. Trusting me, the little road
dared to turn mad, she who had been so circumspect down below in the
valley. Of the trees, some were still summer green and some were russet
gold and some were claret crimson, so that the sifted light was strange,
the light of faery. “There is no state road anywhere,” said my mad
little path to me, “there is nothing in all the world but wood and sky.
You are a tree, a cloud, a leaf,--there is no you! Dance!” In and out
through the trees she eddied and whirled, my road, glad as a scudding
cloud and mad as the wind, in and out, in and out. Free winds that piped
in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced the blue above us, laced
branches that swayed to a dance eternal, exhaustless,--round and round
we eddied, panting, the road and I, all by ourselves, alone, unguessed,
in the heart of the woods. They, too, were drunk with the madness of
out-of-doors, Bacchus’s mænads.
Then, “Whisk!” cried the little road, “we can’t long keep up this sort
of thing, friend-woman!” She turned sober in an instant, wild laughter
dying to bubbling chuckles at itself. The tall trees broke away abruptly
on stump-pocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone walls. We had
come upon a bustling little farm. My road, the wild and lonely-hearted,
was transformed into a chatty neighbor, and turned in cheerily to pass
the time of day at the back door. A brisk and friendly farm it was.
The orchard jounced us a red apple as we passed, a white-nosed horse
thrust head from the barn window and whinnied a welcome. Two shepherd
dogs, one a stiffened grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy, barked
a dutiful protest, then sniffed and licked genially. There was a baby
carriage on the porch, a swing beneath the shaggy dooryard pine, there
were geraniums at the window, and gleaming milk-pans on the back porch.
Beyond the big house was a whole village of miniature houses, kennels
and chicken sheds and corn-cribs, set down cozily anywhere to be handy.
The big red barns were chatty with clucking hens. A sunny, sociable,
commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on the back steps, to pause and
rest there, the road and I. As we chatted, lingering and happy, of
buttermilk and buckwheat and the cut of kitchen aprons, would any one
have guessed that this little cozy domestic road, back there beyond the
turn, had reeled in bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?
When we were alone again, the road explained, questioning with searching
friend-eyes to see if I understood, “Many selves belong to every road
that must be always climbing a hill, all alone. Don’t you know,”
laughed the little road, “that there was never a dryad but longed
sometimes to bind a big apron over her flickering leaf-films and slip
into some crofter’s cot in Tempe and slap the wheat-cakes on the warm
hearth-stones?
“And I have other moods as I climb,” whispered the little road, as we
took hands and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and playing with
them, with no one to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child
that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child within us is not
startled to hear itself laugh out loud in the friendly solitude of
little roads like this.
Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too. Maples like great torches of
flame studded the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields marched the
corn-shocks, a ragged brown battalion. The sky was ever burning bluer
above the hill-crest. Then we left the farm fields for a wild stretch
of boulder-grown pasture, and suddenly the little road said: “Look, a
wayside shrine! Let us stop.”
Pine trees such as survive now in only a few scattered groves formed a
vaulted chapel. Beneath the trees some one had built a rude stone pile,
a picnic fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little wildwood
road all things are natural. We stood silent on that pavement of brown
pine-needles beneath the arching green, supported on its blue-brown
pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far tops there went singing
an eternal chant. No one ever listened long to that music, all alone,
who did not know that it is a hymn older than any creed, and outliving
all doubt. In the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted by
eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart of all desire, so
that, troubled, I asked, “But it was to pray that we stopped?”
“Oh,” answered the pagan road, “I never pray, for what is the use of
learning how to lisp?--I only praise!”
We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but we were deeper friends
when we went on, for there is no bond in friendship closer than the
sharing of a faith. Our feet were springing along as up we went. There
were no more farms now, only at last above us the hilltop and the sky,
clouds that raced across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and the
call of high-winging crows.
The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to say to me this
intimacy, “Do you not know my gospel,--that gladness is God? That is why
I am always climbing hills. That is why I called you this morning, so
that for a little while I and you might step into the sky.”
XIX
_My Mother’s Gardeners_
Of gardens “so much has been said and on the whole so well said,” that I
might perhaps restrain my pen from turning up that overworked soil. But
yet the gardens of which I write have not been like the gardens of the
published page. They have not brought forth generously either prose of
lusty vegetable or poetry of spicy blossom. Although the gardens have
been many, they might almost be described, so alike have they been, as
if they were one, an itinerant garden that has accompanied us from one
little hill village to another; for I write of the stony, arid, sterile
garden-plot of a country parish.
Now, however forbidding the garden that has stretched rearward of each
new domicile, my mother has always fallen upon it with a valiance of
hope that neither years nor disappointment can destroy. She always
thinks that things are going to grow in her gardens, and things do grow
in them, too; but they are not always the things my mother has led me
to expect. For her, I hope she will find the garden of her dreams in
Paradise; for me, this earth will do, even this small, hill-circled
scrap of it; for I am no gardener in my heart, only an observer of
gardens. I own to an unregenerate enjoyment in watching my mother’s
vegetables misbehave, just as, surreptitiously, I can’t help loving the
whimsical goats of my father’s rustic flock.
As I glance back over the unwritten journal of my childhood, I find
the words Choir, Vestry, Garden always printed in capital letters.
The Gardener was a figure as momentous in my infant horizon as was
the Senior Warden. In respect to gardens my mother has never had
any confidence in the assistance of her own family. There have been
occasions when some son or daughter, temporarily in favor, has been
allowed to hoe softly, under supervision; but as to her husband,
banishment is the sole decree. In fact, my father, genuine old English,
imported direct from Trollope, does not show to best advantage in a
garden. In general I have observed that our country clericals are
likely to be at quarrel with the soil, that arid independent old soil
which will grow things in its own way, in utter despite of parsons. My
father’s original sin was due to the usual pastoral reluctance to let
the tares and the wheat grow together unto the harvest, and it was when
he mistook our infant carrots for Heaven-knows-what seed of the Enemy
that the decree of banishment against him as a marauder occurred. Rather
than initiate one of her own home-circle into her garden mysteries, my
mother has chosen the unlikeliest outsider, and solicited advice from
the most unprecedented sources, or by any methods of cajolery; she has
been no stickler in regard to any man’s creed or practice when it has
been a question of so vital a matter as cucumbers.
My retrospect shows our gardeners stretching back to the bounds of my
memory, a lean, gnarled, hoary procession. One of the earliest of them
is Father Time himself, with hoe instead of scythe, and with white locks
rippling down his back. Father Time’s frank admission when engaged might
have daunted some, but did not daunt my mother, for he confided to her
at once that he could hoe but could not walk. He proved useful when
carefully hauled from spot to spot, but our garden was cultivated that
season in circles, of which the hoe was the radius and Father Time the
center.
Another of our ancient hoe-bearers was a veteran. I do not know whether
he had lost his eye on the battlefield or elsewhere, but certainly he
had not exchanged it for wisdom. That is why he is the favorite of my
mother’s recollections. She likes her gardeners a little imbecile. They
are more manageable that way. The burden of their intelligence is the
more usual trouble. A simple faith united to an instant obedience is
the desideratum in gardeners; usually a gardener is as obstinate as he
is conservative, and this is not at all to my mother’s mind. She loves
to glean garden-lore from every source, but better still she loves to
invent garden-lore of her own. She likes to be allowed to set out on an
entirely new tack with some poor erring cabbage, and it is all she can
do to hold on to her ministerial temper when she finds that her gardener
has ruined the work of regeneration by some old-fashioned disciplinary
notions of his own. Our ancient warrior, however, had no notions of his
own, disciplinary or other, and that is why he possesses a shrine apart
in our memories. He was as meek in my mother’s hands as his own hoe, and
he never did anything she did not wish him to do except when he died!
On a bad eminence of contrast my memory declares another figure. I do
not remember whether it was an invincible audacity, or an utter despair
of securing likelier assistance, that led us that year to employ our own
sexton. It is an axiom known to every ministerial household that it
is unwise ever to put any member of your own flock to domestic use. A
brawny Romanist, if such can be obtained, for laundry purposes, a Holy
Roller for the furnace, and a Seventh-Day Baptist for the garden--these
are samples of our principle of selection. I do not know just why those
of our own fold are undesirable,--it is wiser perhaps that the silly
sheep should not see the antic gamboling of the sober shepherd behind
his own locked door, or guess what internal levities spice the discreet
external conduct of his family. I do not know how it was that we fell so
utterly from the grace of common sense as to employ our own sexton that
summer. Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the most mettlesome man
that grows, and not at all to be subdued to the ignoble uses of a hoe.
This sexton was an agony to my father in the sanctuary, and an anguish
to my mother in the garden. He went about with a chip in his mouth, and
he always held it in one corner of his lips and chewed it aggressively
and bitterly, and with the other corner he talked, just as bitterly.
Within his own house he must have exchanged the chip for a pipe, for
although I never saw him smoke, the fragrant tobacco fumes of him were
spread through the house after every back-door colloquy. He talked
more willingly than he worked, and that summer was a lean and sorrowful
season, when the garden languished and my mother was browbeaten, unable,
all because he was the sexton, to bring the man to order with the sharp
nip of her words across his naughty pate.
We were more cautious next time and availed ourselves of one no less
meek than a certain village ancient prominently known to be an Anarchist
and a Methodist. The combination is unusual, I admit, but you may look
for almost anything in a gardener. As an infant, I used to scan his
person for a glimpse of the red shirt, and his lips for a spark of the
incendiary eloquence, but no symptom of either ever showed. He was old
and underfed and taciturn, and he gardened exactly as he wished to,
without paying the tribute even of a comment to my mother’s suggestions.
He had such original methods of his own that, for very amazement, she
gave up her own initiative for the pleasure of watching his. Once when
he was seen solemnly planting stones in one earthy mound after another,
he did break his icy reserve to answer her irrepressible inquiry; he
believed that potatoes grew better that way, since the roots did not
have to pierce the earth for themselves but could wriggle through the
friendly interstices of the stones. That summer was one of cheerful
surprises. This singular spirit had, I believe, a genuine sympathy for
the poor toiling vegetables; I remember that he spent one afternoon in
tying up his tomatoes in copies of a certain sectarian sheet he brought
with him for the purpose. A sportive wind arose in the night, to die
before the Sabbath morning, on which we beheld not only our rectory
lawn, but the utterly Episcopal precincts of the church, bestrewn with
“Glad Tidings of Zion.” He was a lonely soul and dwelt apart, chiefly
in a wheelbarrow. The vehicle was one of his idiosyncracies. He never
appeared without it. Up and down our leafy streets would he trundle it;
but yet I never saw anything in the wheelbarrow except the gardener.
He appeared to push it ever before him for the sole purpose of having
something to sit on when he wished, from the philosophic heights of
his theological and sociological principles, to ruminate upon the evil
behavior of “cabbages and kings.”
As I look back over a long succession of gardeners, I see it, punctuated
as it may be here and there by some salient personality, for the
most part stretching a weary line of the aged and infirm of mind and
body, and I wonder by what survival of the unfittest society devotes
to gardening purposes only those already devoted to decrepitude. As a
matter of fact, the more one becomes acquainted with the vagaries of
growing things, the more one is convinced that it requires nimble wits
and supple muscles to subjugate the army of iniquitous vegetables the
humblest garden can produce. The more you know of the deception and
ingratitude to be experienced in the vegetable world, the sadder you
become. In addition to sharpened brain and taut sinews, the worker
in gardens needs a heart packed with optimism. This last my mother
possesses, and though garden after garden may have gone back on
her, nothing can prevent her running with overtures of salvation to
meet the next little grubby potato-patch life offers her. With hope
indomitable my parents survey each new glebe, while I, the incredulous,
secretly meditate upon the kinship in conduct of all parochial gardens,
expecting only that the sheep and the potatoes will find some new way
of going astray; and may Heaven forgive me that I should be diverted
by their versatility of naughtiness! For example, you can never tell
what you may expect from a tomato, for your tomato is a vegetable of
temperament. Poetically sensitive to atmospheric environment, it fades
to earth under the mildest sun, wilts at a frost imperceptible to its
more prosaic neighbors. Capricious ever, it will sometimes, in mock
of its own cherished nervous system, exhibit a sturdiness out of pure
perversity. One chill June morning we found our young tomato plants flat
to earth, a black and hopeless ruin. We bought new ones and set them
out in their stead, whereupon the old plants popped up and sprouted to
wantonness,--nothing but the elemental energy of jealousy. The tomato is
like to be as barren of production as the human sentimentalist, either
bringing forth a green bower of leafage, or drooping to earth with the
weight of crimson globes that, lifted, show a corroding hole of black
rot.
In homely contrast consider the bean. The bean is the kindliest
vegetable there is. From the seed up, it is well-intentioned, for the
bean may be eaten through and through by worms, and yet, planted, will
sprout and spring, and bring forth fruit out of the very stones.