October Vagabonds Part 3

"That's a silo," said Colin, pointing to a cylindrical tower at the end of a group of barns, from which came the sound of an engine surrounded by a group of men, occupied in feeding it with trusses of corn from a high-piled wagon. "They are laying in fodder for the Winter." Interesting agricultural observation!

In the surrounding fields the pumpkins, globes of golden orange, lay scattered among the wintry-looking corn-stalks.

"Bully subject for a picture!" said Colin.

Before we had gone very far, we did stop at a cottage standing at a puzzling corner of cross-roads, and asked the way, not to Versailles, indeed, but to--Dutch Hollow. We were answered by a good-humoured German voice belonging to an old dame, who seemed glad to have the lonely afternoon silence broken by human speech; and we were then, as often afterward, reminded that we were not so far away from Europe, after all; but that, indeed, in no small degree the American continent was the map of Europe bodily transported across the sea. For the present our way lay through Germany.

Dutch Hollow! The name told its own story, and it had appealed to our imaginations as we had come upon it on the map.

We had thought we should like to see how it looked written in trees and rocks and human habitations on the page of the landscape. And I may say that it was such fanciful considerations as this, rather than any more business-like manner of travel, that frequently determined the route of our essentially sentimental journey. If our way admitted of a choice of direction, we usually decided by the sound of the name of village or town. Thus the sound of "Wales Center" had taken us, we were told, a mile or two out of our way; but what of that? We were not walking for a record, nor were we road-surveying, or following the automobile route to New York. In fact, we had deliberately avoided the gasoline route, choosing to be led by more rustic odours; and thus our wayward wayfaring cannot be offered in any sense as a guide for pedestrians who may come after us. Any one following our guidance would be as liable to arrive at the moon as at New York. In fact, we not infrequently inquired our way of a bird, or some friendly little dog that would come out to bark a companionable good day to us from a wayside porch.

As a matter of fact, I had inquired the way of the bluebird mentioned a little while back, and it may be of interest--to ornithological societies--to transcribe his answer:

_The way of dreams--the bluebird sang-- Is never hard to find So soon as you have really left The grown-up world behind;

So soon as you have come to see That what the others call Realities, for such as you, Are never real at all;

So soon as you have ceased to care What others say or do, And understand that they are they, And you--thank G.o.d--are you.

Then is your foot upon the path, Your journey well begun, And safe the road for you to tread, Moonlight or morning sun.

Pence of this world you shall not take, Yea! no provision heed; A wild-rose gathered in the wood Will buy you all you need.

Hungry, the birds shall bring you food, The bees their honey bring; And, thirsty, you the crystal drink Of an immortal spring.

For sleep, behold how deep and soft With moss the earth is spread, And all the trees of all the world Shall curtain round your bed.

Enchanted journey! that begins Nowhere, and nowhere ends, Seeking an ever-changing goal, Nowhither winds and wends.

For destination yonder flower, For business yonder bird; Aught better worth the travelling to I never saw or heard.

O long dream-travel of the soul!

First the green earth to tread-- And still yon other starry track To travel when you're dead_.

CHAPTER IX

DUTCH HOLLOW

The day had opened with a restless picturesque morning of gusty suns.h.i.+ne and rolling clouds. There was something rich and stormy and ominous in the air, and a soft rainy sense of solemn impending change, at once brilliant and mournful; a curious sense of intermingled death and birth, as of withered leaves and dreaming seeds being blown about together on their errands of decay and resurrection by the same breath of the unseen creative spirit. Incidentally it meant a rain-storm by evening, and its mysterious presage had prompted Colin to the furnis.h.i.+ng of our knapsacks with water-proof cloaks, which, as the afternoon wore on, seemed more and more a wise provision. But the rain still held off, contenting itself with threatening phantasmagoria of cloud, moulding and ma.s.sing like visible thunder in our wake. It seemed leisurely certain, however, of catching us before nightfall; and, sure enough, as the light began to thicken, and we stood admiring its mountainous magnificence--vast billows of plum-coloured gloom, hanging like doomsday over a stretch of haunted orchard--the great drops began to patter down.

Surely the sky is the greatest of all melodramatists. Nothing short of the cataclysmal end of the world could have provided drama to match the stupendous stage-setting of that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it the landscape seemed to grow livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees and gra.s.ses. Oedipus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could hardly have accounted for that angry sky. Such a sky it must have been that carried doom to the cities of the plain. And, after all, it was only Colin and I innocently making haste to Dutch Hollow!

That Teutonic spot seemed hopelessly far away as the rain began to drive down and the horizon to open here and there in lurid slas.h.i.+ngs of stormy sunset; and when the road, which for some time had been one long descent, suddenly confronted us with a rough, perpendicular lane, overgrown with bushes, that seemed more like a cart-track to the stars than a sensible thoroughfare, we realized, with a certain indignant self-pity, that we were walking in real earnest, out in the night and the storm, far from human habitation.

"Nature cannot be so absurd," said I, "as to expect us to climb such a road on such an evening! She must surely have placed a comfortable inn in such a place as this, with ruddy windows of welcome, and a roaring fire and a hissing roast." But, alas! our eyes scanned the streaming copses in vain--nothing in sight but trees, rain and a solitary saw-mill, where an old man on a ladder a.s.sured us in a broken singsong, like the Scandinavian of the Middle West, that indeed Nature did mean us to climb that hill, and that by that road only could we reach the Promised Land of supper and bed.

And the rain fell and the wind blew, and Colin and I trudged on through the murk and the mire, I silently recalling and commenting on certain pa.s.sages in certain modern writers in praise of walking in the rain. At last the hill came to an end--we learned afterward that it was a good mile high--and we stumbled out on to some upland wilderness, unlit by star or window. Then we found ourselves descending again, and at last dim shapes of cl.u.s.tered houses began to appear, and the white phantom of a church. We could rather feel than see the houses, for the night was so dark, and, though here was evidently a village, there was no sign of a light anywhere, not so much as a bright keyhole; nothing but hushed, shuttered shapes of deeper black in the general darkness. So English villages must have looked, m.u.f.fled up in darkness, at the sound of the Conqueror's curfew.

"Surely, they can't all be in bed by seven o'clock?" I said.

"There doesn't seem much to stay up for," laughed Colin.

At length we suspected, rather than saw, a gleam of light at the rear of one of the shrouded shapes we took for houses, and, stumbling toward it, we heard cheerful voices, German voices; and, knocking at a back door, received a friendly summons to enter. Then, out of the night that covered us, suddenly sprang a kitchen full of light and a family at supper, kind German folk, the old people, the younger married couple, and the grandchildren, and a big dog vociferously taking care of them. A lighted glimpse, a few hearty words of direction, and we were out in the night again; for though, indeed, this was Dutch Hollow, its simple microcosm did not include an hotel. For that we must walk on another half-mile or so. O those country half-miles! So on we went again, and soon a lighted stoop flashed on our right. At last! I mounted the steps of a veranda, and, before knocking, looked in at the window. Then I didn't knock, but softly called Colin, who was waiting in the road, and together we looked in. At a table in the centre of a barely furnished, brightly-lit room, an old woman and a young man were kneeling in prayer. Colin and I stood a moment looking at them, and then softly took the road again.

But the inn, or rather the "hotel," did come at last. Alas! however, for dreams of ruddy welcome--rubicund host, and capon turning on the spit. In spite of German accents, we were walking in America, after all. A shabbily-lit gla.s.s door admitted us into a dreary saloon bar, where a hard-featured, gruff-mannered young countryman, after serving beer to two farm-labourers, admitted with apparent reluctance that beds were to be had by such as had "the price," but that, as to supper, well! supper was "over"--supper-time was six-thirty; it was now seven-thirty. The young man seemed no little surprised, even indignant, that any one should be ignorant of the fact that supper-time at Sheldon Center was half-past six; and this, by the way, was a surprise we encountered more than once on our journey. Supper-time in the American road-house is an hour severely observed, and you disregard it at the peril of your empty stomach, for no larders seem so hermetically sealed as the larders of American country hotels after the appointed hour, and no favour so impossible to grant as even a ham sandwich, if you should be so much a stranger to local ordinances as to expect it after the striking of the hour. Indeed, you are looked on with suspicion for asking, as something of a tramp or dangerous character. Not to know that supper-time at Sheldon Center was half-past six seemed to argue a sinister disregard of the usages of civilization.

As we ruefully contemplated a supperless couch, a comely young woman, who had been looking us over from a room in the rear of the bar, came smilingly forward and volunteered to do the best she could for us. She was evidently the rough fellow's wife, G.o.ddess of the kitchen, and final court of appeal. What a difference a good-natured, good-looking woman makes in a place! 'Tis a glimpse into the obvious, but there are occasions on which such commonplaces s.h.i.+ne with a blessed radiance, and the moment when our attractive hostess flowered out upon us from her forbidding background was one of them. With her on our side, we forgot our fears, and, with an a.s.sured air, asked her husband to show us to our rooms. Lamp in hand, he led us up staircases and along corridors--for the hotel was quite a barracks--thawing out into conversation on the way. The place, he explained, was a little out of order, owing to "the ball"--an event he referred to as a matter of national knowledge, and being, we understood, the annual ball of harvesting. The fact of the lamps not burning properly, and there being no water or towels in our rooms, was due, he explained, to this disorganizing festival; as also the circ.u.mstance of our doors having no k.n.o.bs to them. "The young fellows at the ball did carry on so," he said, chuckling with reminiscence of that orgiastic occasion. The Sheldon Center gallants were evidently the very devil; and those vanished door-k.n.o.bs provoked pictures in our minds of Lupercalian revels, which, alas! we had come too late to share.

We should have found anything good that our hostess cared to set before us--so potent a charm is amiability--and I am sure no man need wish for a better supper than the fried eggs and fried potatoes which copiously awaited us down-stairs. As Colin washed his down with coffee, like a true Franco-American, and I washed down mine with English breakfast tea, we pulled out our pipes and smiled contentment at each other.

"Shall we have a chapter of the wisdom of Paragot before bed?" I said, and, going to our small, carefully selected knapsack library, I found the gay-hearted fantastical book we had promised to read together on our wayfaring; and so the day drew to a good end.

Over the head of my bed hung a highly-coloured reproduction of Leonardo's "Last Supper," and stuck in its frame was a leaf of blessed palm--by which tokens I realized that my slumbers were to be under the wing of the ancient Mother. As I closed my eyes, the musical chime of a great bell, high up somewhere in the outer night, fell in benediction upon the darkness. So I fell asleep in Europe, after all.

CHAPTER X

WHERE THEY SING FROM MORNING TILL NIGHT

I awoke to the same silvery salutation, and the sound of country boots echoing across farm-yard cobble-stones. A lantern flas.h.i.+ng in and out among barns lit up my ceiling for a moment, a rough country voice hailed another rough country voice somewhere outside, and the day slowly coughed and sneezed itself awake in the six-o'clock grayness. I heard Colin moving in the next room, and presently we were down-stairs, alertly hungry. Our hostess, with morning smile, asked if we would mind waiting breakfast for "the boarders." Meanwhile, we stepped out into the unfolding day, and the village that had been a mystery to us in the darkness was revealed; a handful of farmhouses on the brow of a solitary-looking upland, and, looming over all, a great cathedral-like church that seemed to have been transported bodily from France. Stepping out to say good-morning to some young pigs that were sociably grunting in a neighbouring sty, we beheld the vast landscape of our preceding day stretched out beneath us, mistily emerging into the widening sunrise.

With pride our eyes traced the steep white road we had so arduously travelled, and, for remembrance, Colin made a swift sketch of Dutch Hollow huddled down there in the valley, with its white church steeple catching the morning sun. And, by this, "the boarders" had a.s.sembled, and we found ourselves at breakfast in a cheery company of three workmen, who were as bright and full of fun as boys out for a holiday. They were presently joined by a fourth, a hearty, middle-aged man, who, as he sat down, greeted us with:

"I feel just like singing this morning."

"Good for you!" said one of us. "That's the way to begin the day." His good nature was magnetic.

"Yes," he laughed, "we sing in Sheldon from morning till night."

"Sheldon's evidently a good place to know," I said. "I will make a note of that for New Yorkers."

So, reader, sometimes when the world seems all wrong, and life a very doubtful speculation, you may care to know of a place where the days go so blithely that men actually sing from morning till night! Sheldon Center is that place. You can find it on any map, and I can testify that the news is true.

And the men that thus sang from morning till night--what was the trade they worked and sang at?

We gathered from a few dropped words that they were engaged on some work over at the church--masonry, no doubt--and, as they left the breakfast-table, in a laughing knot, to begin the day's work, they suggested our giving a look in at them on our way. This we promised to do, for a merrier, better-hearted lot of fellows it would be hard to find. To meet them was to feel a warm glow of human comrades.h.i.+p. Healthy, normal, happy fellows, enjoying their work as men should, and taking life as it came with sane, unconscious gusto; it was a tonic encounter to be in their company.

They were grave-diggers, engaged in renovating the village churchyard!

Yes! and, said our hostess, they were making it like a garden! It had been long neglected and become disgracefully overgrown with weeds and bushes, but now they were tr.i.m.m.i.n.g it up in fine style. They were cemetery experts from Batavia way, and the job was to cost sixteen hundred dollars. But it was worth it, for indeed they were making it look like a garden!

Presently we stepped over to the churchyard. We should not have been human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our four friends in a s.p.a.ce of the churchyard from which the tombstones had been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly sc.r.a.ped--not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the brambles--well, look at it now. We looked. Could anything be more refined or in more perfect taste? The churchyard was as smooth and correct as a newly-barbered head, not a hair out of place. We looked and kept our thoughts to ourselves, but we wondered if the dead were really as grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning? Did they appreciate this mathematical uniformity, this spruce and spotless residential air of their numbered rectangular rest; or was not the old way nearer to their desire, with soft mosses tucking them in from the garish sun, and Spring winds spreading coverlets of wild flowers above their sleep?