The hurry of life in a large town, the constant putting aside of
preference to yield to a most unsatisfactory activity, began to vex me,
and one day I took the train, and only left it for the eastward-bound
boat. Carlyle says somewhere that the only happiness a man ought to ask
for is happiness enough to get his work done; and against this the
complexity and futile ingenuity of social life seems a conspiracy. But
the first salt wind from the east, the first sight of a lighthouse set
boldly on its outer rock, the flash of a gull, the waiting procession of
seaward-bound firs on an island, made me feel solid and definite again,
instead of a poor, incoherent being. Life was resumed, and anxious
living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough
or long enough. It was a return to happiness.
The coast had still a wintry look; it was far on in May, but all the
shore looked cold and sterile. One was conscious of going north as well
as east, and as the day went on the sea grew colder, and all the warmer
air and bracing strength and stimulus of the autumn weather, and storage
of the heat of summer, were quite gone. I was very cold and very tired
when I came at evening up the lower bay, and saw the white houses of
Dunnet Landing climbing the hill. They had a friendly look, these little
houses, not as if they were climbing up the shore, but as if they were
rather all coming down to meet a fond and weary traveler, and I could
hardly wait with patience to step off the boat. It was not the usual
eager company on the wharf. The coming-in of the mailboat was the one
large public event of a summer day, and I was disappointed at seeing
none of my intimate friends but Johnny Bowden, who had evidently done
nothing all winter but grow, so that his short sea-smitten clothes gave
him a look of poverty.
Johnny’s expression did not change as we greeted each other, but I
suddenly felt that I had shown indifference and inconvenient delay by
not coming sooner; before I could make an apology he took my small
portmanteau, and walking before me in his old fashion he made straight
up the hilly road toward Mrs. Todd’s. Yes, he was much grown—it had
never occurred to me the summer before that Johnny was likely, with the
help of time and other forces, to grow into a young man; he was such a
well-framed and well-settled chunk of a boy that nature seemed to have
set him aside as something finished, quite satisfactory, and entirely
completed.
The wonderful little green garden had been enchanted away by winter.
There were a few frost-bitten twigs and some thin shrubbery against the
fence, but it was a most unpromising small piece of ground. My heart was
beating like a lover’s as I passed it on the way to the door of Mrs.
Todd’s house, which seemed to have become much smaller under the
influence of winter weather.
“She hasn’t gone away?” I asked Johnny Bowden with a sudden anxiety just
as we reached the doorstep.
“Gone away!” he faced me with blank astonishment,—“I see her settin’ by
Mis’ Caplin’s window, the one nighest the road, about four o’clock!” And
eager with suppressed news of my coming he made his entrance as if the
house were a burrow.
Then on my homesick heart fell the voice of Mrs. Todd. She stopped,
through what I knew to be excess of feeling, to rebuke Johnny for
bringing in so much mud, and I dallied without for one moment during the
ceremony; then we met again face to face.