Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 10

Then and there I determined to get that flower, and the first thing was to make sure of its location. At first this seemed almost hopeless, since for miles back we had had that narrow strip of marsh-gra.s.s flanked by the unchanging pine woods; but in a few minutes our road pa.s.sed under another railway; here was one landmark, and in a couple of minutes more we went past a way-station slowly enough for me to read the name on the board; now I knew that I could find my plant. The next day we took one of the local trains from Cape May, got off at the station whose name I had read, and started down the track. After a walk of a mile we pa.s.sed under that other railroad; and about two miles farther down the track I saw again the yellow spikes of the flowers barely o'er-topping the gra.s.s.

It had been a hot July morning with a sultry land breeze blowing, and as we walked the three miles down the unshaded track, we had weariedly and unavailingly slapped at mosquitoes at every step. All of these discomforts together had not daunted my courage; but the swarms of mosquitoes that arose buzzing at my first step into the marsh-gra.s.s made me draw back to the comparative security of the railway track, with the feeling that no flower could repay one for facing those swarms. A second look at the yellow flowers growing not thirty feet away gave me fresh courage and I started again. I was as quick as possible; but when I was back once more on the track, this time with my hands full of the flowers, face and hands and arms were one ma.s.s of blotches from the mosquito bites.

Upon a.n.a.lysis the flower proved to be the yellow fringed-orchis, the handsomest species of its genus, and the one most closely allied to the white fringed-orchis. Our train had been running about forty miles an hour; I had never even known that there was a yellow orchid, but in that one quick glance from the express train the unmistakable family look of the orchis had shown.

Success and pleasure in car-window botany depend not so much on a scientific knowledge of structural details as on the ability of the eye to recognize at a glance the characteristic effect produced by a ma.s.s of details. It is this ability which enables you to be sure that you recognize the faces of old flower friends in the hurried glance cast from the window; which enables you to tell with certainty gray-blue clump of houstonias from gray-blue clump of hepaticas, wind-swept bank of purplish phlox from wind-swept bank of wild geranium; and it is that same ability to recognize the characteristic effect produced by a group of structural details which enables one to place without a.n.a.lysis the new flower in the right family.

I have always been secretly very proud of the certainty with which at the first sight of the yellow flower I felt that it was an orchis, but all my feeling in connection with it is not that of pleasure. Certain flowers always recall to me certain sounds; in most cases the sound a.s.sociated with a flower is the one heard at the time at which I first saw the flower; and to this day, with the thought of the yellow fringed-orchis is inseparably joined that most persistent and irritating of sounds, the buzzing of the mosquito.

But the true history of a car-window botanist is not always a record of successful achievement, of the triumphant finding of his flower; he also has his haunting disappointments, his glimpses of strange flowers which he is never afterwards able to place. One July day, riding through northern New Hampshire, I saw just over the fence at the edge of the woods a tall plant--evidently some kind of a lily. It bore a single dark orange-red flower, which did not droop as do the flowers of the meadow lily, but stood stiffly erect. I have never seen that lily since; though never does a July come, especially if it is to be spent in a new place, that I do not think, 'Maybe this year I shall find my lily.' Perhaps, after all, such experiences are not to be cla.s.sed with the disappointments either of life or of car-window botany--is it not rather true that to both they give zest and expectancy?

The charm of such botanizing is not alone in finding or in hoping to find some new flower: even more enduring is the pleasure that comes from the recognition of the faces of old friends in new surroundings. An April day's journey was made one long pleasure; for the swamplike ditch just below the road-bed shone golden with the intense yellow of the marsh-marigold, an old friend from my earliest childhood; and when the railway ran half-way up a hillside, I spied, amid the dead leaves of last year, the little clumps of the cl.u.s.tering blue hepaticas, and recognized even in those fleeting glances the singularly starry effect produced by the numerous white stamens; and as the train crossed over the creeks, that flow over rocky bottoms from out the hemlock woods, I saw in the opening up of the creek bed the June-berry trees in showers of white bloom, looking doubly white against the dark green of the hemlocks, just as I had seen them the day before in the hemlock woods of Mill Creek at my own home.

One of the keenest pleasures of the railway botanist comes from his enjoyment of the ma.s.sed color of great quant.i.ties of flowers of the same kind. One morning our train was running along through the level Jersey country; it was at that wretched hour of the morning when you have just taken your place in someone else's seat while the porter is getting your own ready, and you have that all-over miserable feeling that comes from a night's ride in a stuffy sleeper. In an instant all discomfort was forgotten in the sight of a wide salt meadow which seemed one ma.s.s of the pink swamp-mallows. The gray morning mist was turned silvery white by the rising sun, and giving color to it all were the wide stretches of the flowers. It was all one shimmering ma.s.s of misty silvery-gray, sunlight radiance, and rose-color as delicate as that of the lining of some seash.e.l.ls.

Once again, this time on one of our home roads near Pittsburg, I felt the beauty of the color of great ma.s.ses of flowers. The railway runs along about half-way up the bluffs by the side of the Beaver River; as we rounded a curve, the steep bank above me turned suddenly intensely red with the vivid color of the scarlet campion. Only those who notice most closely have any idea how rare a color in our wild flowers any shade of true red is. Nearly all the flowers that are commonly spoken of as red are in reality purplish pink or reddish lilac. Indeed I know only two wild flowers whose color is a true red. One of these is the cardinal lobelia, whose petals are of the darkest, clearest, most velvety red; and the other flower is the scarlet campion. The color of this latter is true scarlet, and the river bluff that June morning fairly glowed with its bloom. It is Holmes who compares the color of the cardinal flower to that of drops of blood new fallen from a wounded eagle's breast; but any true comparison for the color of this other flower must be founded on life, and on life when it is at its fullest of strength and of enjoyment.

Even the most ardent of car-window botanists will not claim that the only place from which the beauty of the color of flowers in ma.s.s can be appreciated is the window of a railway train. To all there come memories of fitful spring days when in long country drives they have seen partly worn-out meadows and barren hillsides turned to the softest blue-gray mist by the delicate color of countless blossoms of houstonia. And as they drove slowly along the partly dried, muddy roads of mid-April the effect of every varying phase of the spring weather on the ma.s.sed color sank slowly into their consciousness. They had time to notice how blue was the color-mist lying on the sheltered meadows in the sunshine, and how coldly gray it grew as it crept up the hillsides across which the chill spring wind was blowing.

And if one lives in a country where there are chestnut ridges, one looks forward through all the spring to that one week of late June and earliest July when the chestnut trees will be in bloom. The long staminate flowers of the chestnut are a soft cream-yellow with a greenish tint; and on the ridges where the trees grow in abundance the great irregular ma.s.ses of their blossoming tops do not stand out against their background of the dark green foliage of midsummer, but blend softly with it, giving to all such an indescribable effect of lightness and airiness that the whole wooded ridge seems not to be fastened securely to the earth, but to be floating cloud-like above it.

During that one week of the chestnut-blossoming one stops at door or at window in the midst of the early morning work to watch for the moment when the first rays of the rising sun, falling on the cream-yellow of the chestnut tops, turn them into their own deep gold; and at the restful close of day one lingers on the doorstep through the long June twilight till their blossoming tops can no longer be distinguished from the dark foliage of the other trees in the gathering darkness.

All one's life long the pictures of old meadow lands gray-blue with the mist of the houstonias are recalled by the alternate glinting sunshine and bleak gloom of an April day; and the blossoming chestnut woods form the background to many recollections of the old home life. But these pictures which have become a part of one's inmost consciousness are scarcely more dear than that one, seen for a few moments, of the low-lying Jersey meadows flushing rose-pink with the mallows in the misty morning sunshine; or than that other 'vision of scarce a moment,'

the river bluff scarlet with the flowers of the campion, seen from the windows of a railway train.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Studies in Solitude

By Fannie Stearns Gifford

I

She was never lonely, she told herself. The solitude of her little old white house, sitting retired from the village street among its lilac trees and syringas did not frighten or depress her. She could spend a whole day of rain there, seeing no one but the grocer's boy, the big gray cat, and occasional stooped hurrying figures out in the wet street and could come down into evening calmly, busied with her enforced or chosen duties and thoughts. A cloud seemed to wrap her round in many folds of seclusion till the common world of hurry and friction and loud or secret loves and hates was dim to her eyes and ears. Street sounds and whistles of trains at the cross-roads were m.u.f.fled echoes; but the ticking of the tall clock, the throbbing of rain on a tin roof, the infrequent wind banging at a loose window, the cat's creepy tread on the stairs, grew rhythmic and insistent.

Yet she was not lonely. She never stopped to brood, listening long to perilous voices. She denied even to certain pieces of furniture, books, or ornaments, their pa.s.sive right to conjure up the spectre of her solitude. If a room seemed too vibrant with unseen presences, she would enter it and drive out the quivering mystery with some brisk petty business of sweeping, of shifting a picture, or rearranging a book-shelf. Often she whistled softly about her work, although there were moments when as if by an instinct she would stop short and glance over her shoulder, to see nothing, and after that to be still.

So the day would shift from gray dawn to gray dusk; and she had not allowed herself to think that she might have cause for loneliness, there in the quiet house behind its dripping lilac trees.

Only in the evenings did the clock and the rain become too loud and real. Then, as she sat with a pleasant book or broidery in the yellow lamplit circle of her sitting-room, warm and quaint in its acc.u.mulation of color,--old gay reds, greens, blues, tumbled together by generations of fond house-holders, and now subdued into harmony by years and the low light,--she would find herself all at once rigid as an ice-image, yet alert as a coiled serpent; listening, listening,--for what? For a quick step on the flags before the door? For a long jangling peal at the bell?

For a voice in the hall, or a sick querulous summons from the downstairs chamber, or the sc.r.a.ping of a chair from above? No, she knew that she had no cause to wait for these things. There was only the rain, the clock, sleek Diogenes purring on the white fox-skin, the lamp wick fretting a little to itself, and once in a while, out in the dark street, the splash and clatter of wheels, the faint wet whisper of feet that always pa.s.sed her gate.

So, with a self-scorning smile and a drawing of her hand across her eyes, she would take up again the book or needle-work, and stop abruptly that rigid listening for sounds which never came. Long since, on her first solitary night in the old house, she had vowed to herself that she would not be sad, or strange, no matter what tricks her heart and mind might play her. She would not fear memory and antic.i.p.ation, but would compel them to be her servants, to keep their distance. She had been young then, and had not quite believed in her solitude. Now that she knew it through and through, she was still aware that to look too far back or too far forward would equally undo her. On these rainy nights of withdrawal, her trial-times were still upon her. If she failed now, if one shudder or one tear escaped her, she was lost forever; and the white house would drive her out, into a world where she could no more choose her own way of being alone.

But she was not lonely, she repeated; and to prove it, her mind would indulge in a fantasia of loneliness. The book would slip from her hand, and she, gazing half-hypnotized into shadowy corners, visited all the solitary people over the wide world. It pleased her to imagine homesick officers in stifling Indian bungalows; young men and girls, fresh come to the City, wandering forlorn through the glare of streets, or idling under their meagre lodging-house gas-jets; light-keepers on desolate sand-dunes and rock-ledges, climbing at night twisted iron steps to tend the eternal lamp; night-watchmen pacing deserted yards and mill-corridors; sailors in the dead watch; poets and prophets trying pa.s.sionately to capture the wild visions which leaped across their darkness; and most of all, many women sitting as she did in warm quaint rooms, near village streets, hearing the clock tick and the rain throb.

It pleased her, to travel so on light unhindered wing. Almost it seemed as if her soul left her body, and fared out to knock against every lonely window and to keep dumb company round every solitary lamp. And she felt that she was one of an endless army, marching straightforwardly and silently out upon their lives, stripped of the disguises that kindred and close friendship invent, and making, in return for the silence of their hearts and the smiling of their lips, only one demand of all that encountered them.

That demand she never shaped, of her own will. But when she had sat a long time, dreaming, and had at length roused herself to make fast doors and windows, had shut the cat in the kitchen, taken her hand-lamp and gone up the broad stairs to bed--then, in the gay chintz-hung security of her own chamber, her throat would fashion involuntarily those words that her heart and lips refused to let themselves speak.

'It is all right enough,' her throat would say for her, as she turned down the counterpane, untied her shoes, and wound her watch. 'I am quite all safe and right. But--no one must ask me--if I am lonely. No one must ever ask me that.'

II

It had appeared presently that her house was haunted, though not by ghostly terrors. For herself, she had only felt, at times, the vaguely imagined intimation of some presence other than her own in the quiet rooms. But she had no surer knowledge of her dimly harbored guests until a friend, wearied out with the love and care of over-many babies, came to her for rest; and after two days of grateful idleness in her sunny window, asked suddenly,--

'Miriam, whose are the Voices?'

'What voices?' Miriam parried; and Lucy described them: happy, laughing voices, as of young people playing and gossiping together. 'I have heard them so often when I was lying alone and you were out, or off somewhere.

I almost asked a dozen times who was talking. They are always downstairs, or across the hall, or under the window; and they are such happy voices: young voices--oh, very sweet and glad.'

Miriam smiled and stroked her friend's nervous fingers. Lucy had always heard and seen more than other people did, and now that she was so tired, no doubt her worn-out fancy befooled her lightly. They talked it over together. Lucy, smiling at herself, none the less insisted: there were Voices in the house.

'Some time you'll hear them too,' she nodded. 'They're not sad or dreadful or gloomy; oh, no! They're just young and glad. I love to hear them.'

And another evening, when Miriam came into the sitting-room after an errand down the street, Lucy greeted her eagerly, saying,--

'It was music this time. Oh, I've heard such music! I almost went to see if some one wasn't playing. It was like a harp, I think, with a violin and piano: it was very beautiful. I thought some one _must_ be playing, until it came to me that of course it was the Young People. It was happy music, just as the Voices are so happy. Miriam, there _are_ young people somehow in your house.'

It became a sort of gentle pleasant joke between them, while Lucy stayed on. 'Have you heard them to-day?' Miriam would ask; and sometimes Lucy replied, 'No; they must have gone off on a picnic; it was such a good day'; or 'Yes; they were here while you were out this afternoon. I don't see why you don't hear them.'

And Miriam would shake her head. 'I never hear and see Things, you know.

They are your Voices, Lucy; they are your babies grown-up who are talking to you even here in my old-maid house.'

But Lucy denied it. 'No, Miriam, I never heard them anywhere else. They belong to you and your house, and they mean something good, and sweet, and _coming_, not gone by. They're not ghosts.'

And when at last Miriam kissed her good-bye at the train, Lucy was saying, 'I'm glad to think of you, there in your nice sunny house, with the Voices, and the Music. Good-bye, dear.'

As Miriam sat alone that evening, she wondered about those young happy presences. She wished that she could hear them laugh and sing and play; not merely feel them blindly stirring about her. She sat, deep in reverie, smiling at Lucy's merry yet honest insistence upon her quaint little hallucination,--at herself for more than half believing it.

'It is better that I never hear them,' she concluded at last, rather soberly. 'I couldn't live alone this way if I heard them. It is all well enough for Lucy, with her husband and her houseful of babies, to hear things like that; granting that she truly did, dear mysterious Lucy!--But if I heard them--if I heard them,--' she glanced about the room as if she half expected to see a gay face above the piano, a bright head bending by the lamp,--'it would mean that I was going a little bit mad: yes, just a little bit mad, for all that they are sweet, young voices.'

She shivered, stood up quickly, and went over to the long mirror.

'Miriam,' she whispered, looking into the shadowy face that met hers, 'Lucy said those were young voices, _coming_ voices, not gone by. But you know, Miriam, that if they are, they belong to some one else who may live in this house: to some one else, I tell you, not to you at all.

Don't be a fool.--You've been quite sensible so far: don't spoil it all now. Do you hear? you mustn't even wish to hear those Voices, or that lovely harp-music. Now you understand.'

Months later she saw her friend again. 'How are the Voices?' Lucy asked gayly, across the laughing baby who pulled at her necktie and s.n.a.t.c.hed down her curls.

'I never hear them,' Miriam answered, almost shortly. 'You know, don't you,--"to him that hath shall be given"?--Please may I hold the baby?'

III

Yet often, when she had spent a part of the day or evening away from home, she had a curious expectation of returning to find her house not empty and silent, but with something alive in it to greet her. She did not think of the people who had been her own in the different days so far past, nor of her living friends, nor of the young presences whose laughter Lucy had insisted upon hearing. It seemed to her simply that there was more life and motion and personality in her waiting house, than just Diogenes crouching on the front porch, and the kettle steaming to itself on the back of the stove.