October Vagabonds Part 4

But--who knows?--perhaps the dead prefer to be up-to-date, and to follow the fas.h.i.+on in funeral furnis.h.i.+ngs; and surely such expert necropolitans as our four friends ought to know. No doubt the Sheldon Center dead would have the same tastes as the Sheldon Center living; for, after all, we forget, in our idealization of them, that the dead, like the living, are a vast _bourgeoisie_. Yes! it is a depressing thought--the _bourgeoisie_ of the dead!

As we stood talking, the young priest of the parish joined our group. He was a German, from Dusseldorf, and his worn face lit up when he found that Colin had been at Dusseldorf and could talk with him about it. As he stood with us there on that bleak upland, he seemed a pathetic, symbolic figure, lonely standard-bearer of the spirit in one of the dreary colonies of that indomitable church that carries her mystic sacraments even into the waste places and borders of the world. The romance of Rome was far away beyond that horizon on which he turned his wistful look; here was its hard work, its daily prose. But he turned proudly to the great pile that loomed over us. We had commented on its size in so remote a parish.

"Yes, I am proud of our people," he said. "It is greatly to their credit." One could not help silently wondering that the spiritual needs of this handful of lonely houses should demand so ambitious a structure.

But the symbols of the soul can never be too impressive. Then we said good-bye to our friends, and struck out into the morning suns.h.i.+ne, leaving the village of song behind.

Yes! in Sheldon Center they sing from morning till night--at grave-making!

CHAPTER XI

APPLE-LAND

It was a s.p.a.cious morning of windswept suns.h.i.+ne, with a wintry bite in the keen air. Meadow-larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had here and there made a thin music, as of straggling bands of survivors of the Summer, were numbed into silence again. Once or twice we caught sight of the dainty snipe in the meadows, and high over the woods a bird-hawk floated, as by some invisible anchorage, in the sky. It was an austere landscape, grave with elm and ash and pine. For a s.p.a.ce, a field of buckwheat standing in ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple orchards which cl.u.s.tered about the scattered houses, with piles of golden pumpkins and red apples under the trees. And is there any form of piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain--the treasuries of Pomona and Vertumnus? Such treasuries, in the markets of this world, are worth only a modest so-much-a-bushel, yet I think I should actually feel myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money.

From a corn-growing country, we were evidently pa.s.sing into a country whose beautiful business was apples. Orchards began more or less to line the road, and wagons with those same apple-barrels became a feature of the highway.

Another of its features was the number of old ruined farmhouses we came on, standing side by side with the new, more ambitious homesteads. We seldom came on a prosperous-looking house but a few yards away was to be seen its aged and abandoned parent, smothered up with bushes, roof fallen in, timbers ready to collapse, the deserted hearth choked with debris and overgrown with weeds--the very picture of a haunted house. Here had been the original home, always small, seldom more than four rooms, and when things had begun to prosper, a more s.p.a.cious, and often, to our eyes, a less attractive, structure had been built, and the old home left to the bats and owls, with a complete abandonment that seemed to us--sentimental travellers as we were--as cynical as it was curiously wasteful.

Putting sentiment out of the question, we had to leave unexplained why the American farmer should thus allow so much good building material to go to waste. Besides, as we also noted much farm machinery rusting unhoused in the gra.s.s, we wondered why he did not make use of these old buildings for storage purposes. But the American farmer has puzzled wiser heads than ours, so we gave it up and turned our attention once more to our own fanciful business, one highly useful branch of which was the observation of the names on the tin letter-boxes thrusting themselves out at intervals along the road.

The history of American settlement could, I suppose, be read in those wayside letter-boxes, in such names, for instance, as "Theo. Leveque" and "Paul Fugle," which, like wind-blown exotics from other lands, we found within a few yards of each other. One name, that of "Silvernail," we decided could only lawfully belong to a princess in a fairy tale. Such childishness as this, I may say, is of the essence of a walking trip, in which, from moment to moment, you take quite infantile interest in all manner of idle observation and quite useless lore. That is a part of the game you are playing, and the main thing is that you are out in the open air, on the open road, with a simple heart and a romantic appet.i.te.

Here is a little picture of a wayfaring day which I made while Colin was sketching one of those ruined farms:

_Apples along the highway strewn, And morning opening all her doors; The cawing rook, the distant train, The valley with its misty floors;

The hillside hung with woods and dreams, Soft gleams of gossamer and dew; From c.o.c.kcrow to the rising moon The rainbowed road for me and you.

Along the highroad all the day The wagons filled with apples go, And golden pumpkins and ripe corn, And all the ruddy overflow

From Autumn's ap.r.o.n, as she goes About her orchards and her fields, And gathers into stack and barn The treasure that the Summer yield.

A singing heart, a laughing road, With salutations all the way,-- The gossip dog, the hidden bird, The pig that grunts a gruff good-day;

The apple-ladder in the trees, A friendly voice amid the boughs, The farmer driving home his team, The ducks, the geese, the uddered cows;

The silver babble of the creek, The willow-whisper--the day's end, With murmur of the village street, A called good-night, an unseen friend_.

CHAPTER XII

ORCHARDS AND A LINE FROM VIRGIL

Orchards! We were walking to New York--through orchards. And we might have gone by train! A country of orchards and gold-dust suns.h.i.+ne falling through the quaint tapestry trees, falling dreamily on heaped-up gold, and the grave backs of little pigs joyously at large in the apple twilight. A drowsy, murmuring spell was on the land, the spell of fabled orchards, and of old enchanted gardens--

_In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon_--

the country of King Alcinous. At intervals, as we walked on through the cider-dreamy afternoon, thinking apples, smelling apples, munching apples, there came a mellow sound like soft thunder through the trees. It was the thunder of apples being poured into barrels, and, as in a sleep, the fragrant wagons pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed along the road--"the slow-moving wagons of our lady of Eleusis."

That line of Virgil came to me, as lines will sometimes come in fortunate moments, with the satisfaction of perfect fitness to the hour and the mood, gathering into one sacred, tear-filled phrase the deep sense that had been possessing me, as we pa.s.sed the husbandmen busy with the various harvest, of the long antiquity of these haunted industries of the earth.

So long, so long, has man pursued these ancient tasks; so long ago was he urging the plowshare through the furrow, so long ago the sower went forth to sow; so long ago have there been barns and byres, granaries and thres.h.i.+ng-floors, mills and vineyards; so long has there been milking of cows, and herding of sheep and swine. Can one see a field of wheat gathered into sheaves without thinking of the dream of Joseph, or be around a farm at lambing time without smiling to recall the cunning of Jacob? Already were all these things weary and old and romantic when Virgil wrote and admonished the husbandman of times and seasons, of plows and harrows, of mattocks and hurdles, and the mystical winnowing fan of Iacchus.

To the meditative, romantic mind, the farmer and plowman, standing thus in the foreground of the infinite perspective of time, take on a sacred significance, as of traditional ministers of the ancient mysteries of the earth.

Perhaps it is one's involuntary sense of this haunted antiquity that gives its peculiar expressiveness to the solemn, almost religious quiet of barns and stables, the, so to say, prehistoric hush of brooding, sun-steeped rickyards; and gives, too, a homely, sacerdotal look to the implements and vessels of the farm. A churn or a cheese-press gives one the same deep, uncanny thrill of the terrible vista of time as Stonehenge itself; and from such implements, too, there seems to breathe a sigh--a sigh of the long travail and unbearable pathos of the race of men.

You will thus see the satisfaction, in moods of such meditation, of carrying in one's knapsack a line from Virgil--"the slow-moving wagons of our Lady of Eleusis"--and I congratulated myself on my forethought in having included in our itinerant library a copy of Mr. Mackail's beautiful translation of "The Georgics." Walt Whitman, talking to one of his friends about his habit of carrying a book with him on his nature rambles, said that nine times out of ten he would never open the book, but that the tenth time he would need it very badly. So I needed "The Georgics" very badly that afternoon, and the hour would have lost much of its perfection had I not been able to take the book from my knapsack, and corroborate my mood, while Colin was sketching an old barn, by reading aloud from its consecrated pages:

"_I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them of old, if thou shrink not back nor weary to learn of lowly cares. Above all must the thres.h.i.+ng-floor be levelled with the ponderous roller, and wrought by hand and cemented with clinging potter's clay, that it may not gather weeds nor crack in the reign of dust, and be playground withal for manifold destroyers. Often the tiny mouse builds his house and makes his granaries underground, or the eyeless mole scoops his cell; and in c.h.i.n.ks is found the toad, and all the swarming vermin that are bred in earth; and the weevil, and the ant that fears a dest.i.tute old age, plunder the great pile of spelt_."

Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say: "What did you want with hooks out of doors? Was not Nature enough?" No one who loves both books and Nature would ask that question, or need to have explained why a knapsack library is a necessary adjunct of a walking-tour.

For Nature and books react so intimately on each other, and, far more than one realizes without thought, our enjoyment of Nature is a creation of literature. For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the Twenty-third Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn cadences of the book of Job? All our experiences, new and personal as they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth and thrill to the ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us. Literature but represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfies through expression our human need for some sympathetic partic.i.p.ation with us in our human experience.

That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved as I am by the unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my own feelings; and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it all long ago, makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for me to-day. Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they say, but for what they are. As with any other friend, you may go a whole day with them, and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily conscious of a perfect companions.h.i.+p. The book we know and love--and, of course, one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a companion--has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands. So, a single flower in the hand is a key to Summer, a floating perfume the key to the hidden gardens of remembrance. The wrong book in the hand, whether opened or not, is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person; and therefore it was with great care that I chose my knapsack library. It consisted of these nine books:

Mackail's "Georgics."

Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales.

Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Locke's "Beloved Vagabond."

Selections from R.L.S.

Pater's "Marius the Epicurean."

Alfred de Musset's "Premieres Poesies."

Baedeker's "United States."

Road Map of New York State.

And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day.

CHAPTER XIII

FELLOW WAYFARERS

With the morn our way still lay among apples and honey, hives and orchards; a land of prosperous farms, sumptuous rolling downs, rich woodland, sheep, more pigs, more apple-barrels and velvety suns.h.i.+ne. The old ruined houses had ceased, and the country had taken on a more generous, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed aspect. Nature was preparing for one of her big Promised Land effects. We were coming to the valley of the Genesee River. We made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the look of a landscape. Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity. They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated, up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural terms as "ensilage," "irrigation" and "fertilizer." Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance--the difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind. The countryside of the Genesee valley has the romantic prosperous look. Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of the golden age. As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways--particularly with their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with the two outlandish packmen--the very teeth one would expect in an apple-country. Perhaps they came of so much sweet commerce with apples!

The possessor of a particularly fine display hailed us as he drove by in an empty wagon, at the tail of which trailed a long orchard ladder, and asked us if we would care for a lift. Now it happened that his suggestion came like a voice from heaven for poor Colin, one of whose shoes had been casting a gloom over our spirits for several miles. So we accepted with alacrity, and, really, riding felt quite good for a change! Our benefactor was a bronzed, handsome young fellow, just through Cornell, he told us, and proud of his brave college, as all Cornell men are. He had chosen apple-farming for his career, and, naturally, seemed quite happy about it; lived on his farm near by with his mother and sister, and was at the moment out on the quest of four apple-packers for his harvesting, these experts being at a premium at this season. We rattled along gaily in the broad afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, exchanging various human information, from apple-packing to New York theatres, after the manner of the companionable soul of man, and I hope he liked us as well as we liked him.

One piece of information was of particular interest to Colin, the whereabouts of one "Billy the Cobbler," a character of the neighbourhood, who would fix Colin's shoe for him, and, incidentally, if he was in the mood, give us a musical and dramatic entertainment into the bargain.