The Hills of Hingham Part 15

"Horrors! a chair! why, I said a four-legged thing."

"Well, how many legs has a chair?"

"Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four legs?"

"Certainly."

"Then it must have four feet, hasn't it?"

"Cert--why--I--don't--know exactly about that," I stammered. "But if you want a rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have it, feet or fins, four legs or two, though I must confess that I don't exactly know, according to legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong."

"I don't want any chair, nor anything else with wooden legs."

"What kind of legs, then?"

"Bone ones."

"Why! why! I don't know any bone-legged things."

"Bones with hair on them."

"Oh, you want a Teddybear--_you_, and coming eight! Well! Well! But Teddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone."

The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk ceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had me guessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossil forms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though long since my only question had been--What breed? August came finally, and a few days before the 24th we started by automobile for New Jersey.

We were speeding along the road for Princeton when all four boys leaned forward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:--

"Shall I have any birthday down here, Father?"

"Certainly."

"Have you guessed _what_ yet?"

I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle till the words were s.n.a.t.c.hed from his teeth by the swirling dust behind and conversation was made impossible. Two days later, the birthday found us at Uncle Joe's.

Babe was playing with Trouble, the little Scotch-Irish terrier, when Uncle Joe and I came into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe looked up and asked:--

"Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged thing I want for my birthday?"

"You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I caught up the dear child in my arms and kept back his cries with kisses.

"And you shall have one, too, if you will give me three or four weeks to get him for you. Trouble here is the daddy of--goodness! I suppose he is--of I don't know how many little puppies--but a good many--and I am giving you one of them right now, for this birthday, only, you will wait till their mother weans them, of course?"

"Yes, yes, of course!"

And so it happened that several weeks later a tiny black-and-tan puppy with nothing much of a tail came through from New Jersey to Hingham to hearts that had waited for him very, very long.

Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter day of that kind on the calendar. These are only the beginning of such days, our own peculiar days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because in one way or another these days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of the soul.

There is Melon Day, for example,--a movable feast-day in August, if indeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, you ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul?

This is Ma.s.sachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of Jersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even to the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of something out of Eden before the fall. But here in Ma.s.sachusetts, Ah, the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off, m.u.f.fled thud,--the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and quail gathered daily at the grocer's.

We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That is everybody's day, while the red-letter days on our calendar--Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the day close to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; or the Day of the First Snow--these days are peculiarly, privately our own, and these are red.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Fields of Fodder]

XIV

THE FIELDS OF FODDER

It is doubtless due to early a.s.sociations, to the large part played by cornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these New England farms without a touch of homesickness. It was always the autumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and there was something connected with the husking and the shocking of the corn that took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single event of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautiful and significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shock not so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth's life, or rather of life--here on the earth as one could wish it to be--lived to the end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered and set in order over a broad field.

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I was a boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted cornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played--the notes of the wind coming over the field of corn-b.u.t.ts and stirring the loose blades as it moved among the silent shocks. I have more than a memory of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winter rain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillment of some solemn compact between us--between me and the fields and skies.

Is this too much for a boy to feel? Not if he is father to the man! I have heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this is the 21st of June, the longest day of the year--as if the shadows were already lengthening, even across their morning way.

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come a four-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoon shadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals. No, I would return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn is cut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing to the ground.

At that word "sighing" many trusting readers will lay this essay down.

They have had more than enough of this brand of pathos from their youth up.

"The 'sobbing wind,' the 'weeping rain,'-- 'Tis time to give the lie To these old superst.i.tious twain-- That poets sing and sigh.

"Taste the sweet drops,--no tang of brine, Feel them--they do not burn; The daisy-buds, whereon they shine, Laugh, and to blossoms turn"--

that is, in June they do; but do they in October? There are no daisies to laugh in October. A few late asters fringe the roadsides; an occasional bee hums loudly in among them; but there is no sound of laughter, and no shine of raindrops in the broken h.o.a.ry seed-stalks that strew the way. If the daisy-buds _laugh_,--as surely they do in June,--why should not the wind sob and the rain weep--as surely they do--in October? There are days of shadow with the days of sunshine; the seasons have their moods, as we have ours, and why should one be accused of more sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, in yielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the slow, slanting rain of October weeps, and the soughing wind comes sobbing through the trees?

Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat off the fading leaves and flatten them into shapeless patterns on the soaking floor.

Fall and slant and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, through the creaking branches, blow about the whispering corners; parley there outside my window; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hiding, and if I am sad, sigh with me and sob.

May one not indulge in gentle melancholy these closing days of autumn, and invite the weather in, without being taken to task for it? One should no more wish to escape from the sobering influence of the October days than from the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the wide wonder of the stars.

"If winds have wailed and skies wept tears, To poet's vision dim, 'T was that his own sobs filled his ears, His weeping blinded him"--

of course! And blessed is the man who finds winds that will wail with him, and skies that love him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves his friends and next of kin a great deal of perfunctory weeping.

There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October. A single, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacity for joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still ache for more. So it happens that June is only a memory of individual days, while October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a spirit, a soul, beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So much is already gone, so many things seem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the wooded hillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the very sunshine of October.

In June the day itself was the great event. It is not so in October.

Then its coming and going were attended with ceremony and splendor, the dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all the pageantry and pomp of a regal fete. Now the day has lessened, and breaks tardily and without a dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades into the night. The warp of dusk runs through even its sunlit fabric from daybreak to dark.

It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, this screen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of the fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October mood of things.

For it is the inner mood of things that has changed as well as the outward face of things. The very heart of the hills feels it. The hush that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. The blackened gra.s.s, the blasted vine, have not grown green again. No new buds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the old leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the cornfield is only an area of stubs and long lines of yellow shocks; and in the corners of the meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks,--joe-pye-weed, boneset, goldenrod,--bare and already bleaching; and deep within their matted shade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amber pendant of the jewel-weed, to which a b.u.mble-bee comes droning on wings so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe to listen!