The Hills of Hingham Part 16

There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry of the hyla is stilled--the cawing of crows beyond the wood, the scratching of a beetle in the crisp leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tiny chirrup of a cricket in the gra.s.s--remnants of sounds from the summer, and echoes as of single strings left vibrating after the concert is over and the empty hall is closed.

But how sweet is the silence! To be so far removed from sounds that one can hear a single cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the leaves! Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. One cannot sit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged to stand up--in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silence in life's desert of confusion and din. If October brought one nothing else but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough. For the silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm. There is none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, none of the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of the death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, none of the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars, none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without bound or break, eternal--none of these qualities in the sweet silence of October. I have listened to all of these, and found them answering to mute tongues within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such moods are rare--moods that can meet death, that can sweep through the heavens with the constellations, and that can hold converse with the dumb, stirless desert; whereas the need for the healing and restoration found in the serene silence of October is frequent.

There are voices here, however, many of them; but all subdued, single, pure, as when the chorus stops, and some rare singer carries the air on, and up, and far away till it is only soul.

The joyous confusion and happy tumult of summer are gone; the mating and singing and fighting are over; the growing and working and watch-care done; the running even of the sap has ceased; the grip of the little twigs has relaxed, and the leaves, for very weight of peace, float off into the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, lies in the after-summer sun, and dreams.

With empty hands in the same warm sun I lie and dream. The sounds of summer have died away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet broken over the barriers of the north. Above my head stretches a fanlike branch of witch-hazel, its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twisted flowers just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before its yellow straps have burned crisp and brown. But let it fall. It must melt again; for as long as these pale embers glow the icy hands of winter shall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world.

And so I dream. The woods are at my back, the level meadow and wide fields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy air glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the gra.s.s, a glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles through the slanting reeds of the sun.

It is not the wind that weaves; it is a mult.i.tude of small spiders.

Here is one close to my face, out at the tip of a slender gra.s.s-stem, holding on with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hind legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. The threads stream and sway and lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the little aeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through the sky.

Long before we dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the meadow sea.

Who taught him navigation? By what compa.s.s is he steering? And where will he come to port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard-hack on the other side of the pasture; or perhaps some wild air-current will sweep him over the woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him a hundred miles away. No matter. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and there is no port where the wind never blows.

Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except in this soft and sunny weather. The autumn seeds are sailing too--the pitching parachutes of thistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachts under sail--a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almost cottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thick in the clearing.

As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away. One cannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, of fields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all full of song as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the seeds are done.

The autumn wind goeth forth to sow, and with the most lavish of hands.

He wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs them, rounds them, and angles them; they fly and fall, they sink and swim, they stick and shoot, they pa.s.s the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake of a chance to grow. They even lie in wait for me, plucking me by the coat-sleeve, fastening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until I have walked with them into my very garden. The cows are forced to carry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them on their foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or wayward breeze would go. Not a corner within the horizon but will get its needed seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field to the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again with the coming spring.

The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, most of them having already gone. Soon I shall hear the bugle notes of the last guard as the Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight for the South. And yonder stands the fodder, brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely tied against the beating rains. How can one be melancholy when one knows the meaning of the fodder, when one is able to find in it his faith in the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wisdom which has been built into the round of the year?

To him who lacks this faith and understanding let me give a serene October day in the woods. Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can get a large view of earth and sky. "One seems to get nearer to nature in the early spring days," says Mr. Burroughs. I think not, not if by nearer you mean closer to the heart and meaning of things. "All screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not hidden by verdure and foliage." That is true; yet for most of us her lips are still dumb with the silence of winter. One cannot come close to bare, cold earth. There is only one flat, faded expression on the face of the fields in March; whereas in October there is a settled peace and sweetness over all the face of Nature, a fullness and a non-withholding in her heart that makes communication natural and understanding easy.

The sap is sinking in the trees, the great tides of life have turned, but so slowly do they run these soft and fragrant days that they seem almost still, as at flood. A blue jay is gathering acorns overhead, letting one drop now and then to roll out of sight and be planted under the mat of leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into and through the trees, talking quietly among themselves as they search for food, moving all the while--and to a fixed goal, the far-off South.

Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field; the odor of ripened fox grapes is brought with a puff of wind from across the pasture; the smell of mint, of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the sun.

These are not the odors of death; but the fragrance of life's very essence, of life ripened and perfected and fit for storing till another harvest comes. And these flitting warblers, what are they but another sign of promise, another proof of the wisdom which is at the heart of things? And all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and creeper, of burning berries on dogwood and ilex and elder--this sunset of the seasons--but the preparation for another dawn?

If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, if one would be pressed to her beating heart, if one would feel the mother in the soul of things, let these October days find him in the hills, or where the river makes into some vast salt marsh, or underneath some ancient tree with fields of corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that reach and round themselves along the rim of the sky.

The sun circles warm above me; and up against the snowy piles of cloud a broad-winged hawk in lesser circles wheels and flings its piercing cry far down to me; a fat, dozy woodchuck sticks his head out and eyes me kindly from his burrow; and close over me, as if I too had grown and blossomed there, bends a rank, purple-flowered ironweed. We understand each other; we are children of the same mother, nourished at the same abundant breast, the weed and I, and the woodchuck, and the wheeling hawk, and the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes against the sky--I am brother to them all. And this is home, this earth and sky--these fruitful fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed and river flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for no fairer home, none larger, none of more abundant or more golden corn. If aught is wanting, if just a tinge of shadow mingles with the rowan-scented haze, it is the early-falling twilight, the thought of my days, how short they are, how few of them find me with the freedom of these October fields, and how soon they must fade into November.

No, the thought of November does not disturb me. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also are the months and seasons. And if I watch closely I shall see that not only are the birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their winter lodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds putting on their thick, furry coats--life everywhere preparing for the cold. I need to take the same precaution,--even in my heart. I will take a day out of October, a day when the woods are aflame with color, when the winds are so slow that the spiders are ballooning, and lying where I can see them ascending and the parachute seeds go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes are opened to see larger and plainer things go by--the days with the round of labor until the evening; the seasons with their joyous waking, their eager living; their abundant fruiting, and then their sleeping--for they must needs sleep. First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear, and after that the field of fodder. If so with the corn and the seasons, why not so with life? And what of it all could be fairer or more desirable than its October?--to lie and look out over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut and shocked against the winter with my own hands!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Going back to town]

XV

GOING BACK TO TOWN

"Labor Day, and school lunches begin to-morrow," She said, carefully drying one of the "Home Comforts" that had been growing dusty on an upper shelf since the middle of June.

She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the four boys and one for me) on the back of the stove and stood looking a moment at them.

"Are you getting tired of spreading us bread and b.u.t.ter?" I asked.

She made no reply.

"If you don't put us up our comforts this year, how are we going to dispose of all that strawberry jam and currant jelly?"

"I am not tired of putting up lunches," she answered. "I was just wondering if this year we ought not to go back to town. Four miles each way for the boys to school, and twenty each way for you. Are n't we paying a pretty high price for the hens and the pleasures of being snowed in?"

"An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly.

"And we 've paid it now these dozen winters running. Let's go into Boston and take that suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last fall in Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of the Avenue and the railroad tracks. The boys can count freight cars until they are exhausted, and watch engines from their windows night and day."

"It isn't a light matter," she went on. "And we can't settle it by making it a joke. You need to be near your work; I need to be nearer human beings; the children need much more rest and freedom than these long miles to school and these many ch.o.r.es allow them."

"You 're entirely right, my dear, and this time we 'll do it. Our good neighbor here will take the cow; I 'll give the cabbages away, and send for 'Honest Wash' Curtis to come for the hens."

"But look at all this wild-grape jelly!" she exclaimed, turning to an array of forty-four little garnet jars which she had just covered with hot paraffin against the coming winter.

"And the thirteen bushels of potatoes," I broke in. "And the apples--there are going to be eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwins this year. And--"

But it never comes to an end--it never has yet, for as soon as we determine to do it, we feel that we can or not, just as we please.

Simply deciding that we will move in yields us such an instant and actual city sojourn that we seem already to have been and are now gladly getting back to the country again.

So here we have stayed summer and winter, knowing that we ought to go back nearer my work so that I can do more of it; and nearer the center of social life so we can get more of it--life being pretty much lost that is not spent in working, or going, or talking! Here we have stayed even through the winters, exempt from public benefits, blessing ourselves, every time it snows on Sat.u.r.day, that we are here and not there for our week ends, here within the "tumultuous privacy" of the storm and our own roaring fireplace, with our own apples and popcorn and books and selves; and when it snows on Monday wishing the weather would always temper itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of Mullein Hill--its length of back country road and automobile.

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you give it. Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neighbor Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, as indeed he is, his sense of safety on the way, the absolute certainty (so far as there can be human certainty) of his arriving sometime, being compensation enough for the loss of those sensations of speed induced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the automobile.

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the great hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is seated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myself rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself that time wholly? s.p.a.ce is Time's tail and we can't catch it. The most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going around the corner ahead.

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here into Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough away to save a man from all that pa.s.ses along the road. The wind, too, bloweth where it listeth, and when there is infection on it, you can't escape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely. And once the sporulating speed germs get into your system, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you, their multiplying and bursting into the blood occurring regularly, accompanied by a chill at two cylinders and followed by a fever for four; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just like malaria!

We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He has instead a "stavin'"

good mare by the name of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago, from fast stock, as you would know if you held the cultivator behind her. When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come with her to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort her into remembering that the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that a row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard highways hurt Bill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays takes every automobile's dust, and none too sweetly either.

"Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the end of a row, "why don't you get an automobile?"

"I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; but I don't need a car much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with the traces and the teeth of the harrow. "Besides, they 're skittish, nervous things compared with a hoss. What I 'd like is something neither one nor t'other--a sort of cross between an auto and Bill."

"Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, "with a cultivator attachment?

It would n't step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, and I think it would beat Bill on the road."

There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off down another row, with Jonas saying:--

"Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me."

And for me, too; yet there is no denying that conditions have changed, that a mult.i.tude of new ills have been introduced into the social organism by the automobile, and except in the deep drifts of winter, the Ford car comes nearer curing those ills than any other anti-toxin yet discovered.