October Vagabonds Part 8

Yea! all his thoughts are country-sweet, And safe the walking of his feet,

However hard and long the way-- With country sleep to end the day.

To drain this cup no man shall rue-- The innocent madness of the dew

Who shall repent, or frenzy fine Of morning star, or the divine

Inebriation of the hours When May roofs in the world with flowers!

About this cup the swallows skim, And the low milking-star hangs dim

Across the meadows, and the moon Is near in heaven_--_the young moon;

And murmurs sweet of field and hill Loiter awhile, and all is still.

As in some chapel dear to Pan, The fair milk glimmers in the can,

And, in the silence cool and white, The cream mounts through the listening night;

And, all around the sleeping house, You hear the breathing of the cows,

And drowsy rattle of the chain, Till lo! the blue-eyed morn again_.

CHAPTER XIX

A GROWL ABOUT AMERICAN COUNTRY HOTELS

Though Colin and I had been walking but a very few days, after the first day or two it seemed as though we had been out on the road for weeks; as though, indeed, we had spent our lives in the open air; and it needed no more than our brief experience for us to realize what one so often reads of those who do actually live their lives out-of-doors, gypsies, sailors, cowboys and the like--how intolerable to them is a roof, and how literally they gasp for air and s.p.a.ce in the confined walls of cities.

Bed in the bush with stars to see, Bread I dip in the river--

There's the life for a man like me, There's the life forever.

The only time of the day when our spirits began to fail was toward its close, when the shadows of supper and bed in some inclement inn began to fall over us, and we confessed to each other a positive sense of fear in our evening approach to the abodes of men. After a long, safe, care-free day, in the company of liberating prospects and sweet-breathed winds, there seemed a curious lurking menace in the most harmless village, as well as an unspeakable irksomeness in its inharmonious interruption of our mood. To emerge, saturated, body and soul, with the sweet scents and sounds and sights of a day's tramp, out of the meditative leafiness and spiritual temper of natural things, into the garishly lit street of some little provincial town, animated with the clumsy mirth of silly young country folks, aping so drearily the ribaldry, say, of Elmira, is a painful anticlimax to the spirit. Had it only been real Summer, instead of Indian Summer, we should, of course, have been real gypsies, and made our beds under the stars, but, as it was, we had no choice. Or, had we been walking in Europe ... yes, I am afraid the truth must out, and that our real dread at evening was--the American country hotel. With the best wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American country hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to come floating to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights came out in the windows--"to take mine ease at mine inn;" and a.s.suredly it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote:

_Whoe'er hath travelled life's dull round, Whate'er his fortunes may have been, Must sigh to think he still has found His warmest welcome at an inn_.

Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would probably have been more after this fas.h.i.+on: "A wonderful day has come to a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place, ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women.

We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish.

Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."

Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less pretentious.

Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some pa.s.ser-by about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked: "Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs, lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.

But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps under all circ.u.mstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun out of the rigours of the American country hotel.

In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was nothing more remarkable than the b.u.t.ton of an ordinary electric bell, which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for ice-water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science and referred to it, in solemnly printed "rules" for its use, as no less than "The Emergency Drop Annunciator!" Angels of the Annunciation! what a heavenly phrase!

But this is an ill-tempered chapter--let us begin another.

CHAPTER XX

ONIONS, PIGS AND HICKORY-NUTS

One feature of the countryside in which from time to time we found innocent amus.e.m.e.nt was the blackboards placed outside farmhouses, on which are written, that is, "annunciated," the various products the farmer has for sale, such as apples, potatoes, honey, and so forth. On one occasion we read: "Get your horses' teeth floated here." There was no one to ask about what this mysterious proclamation meant. No doubt it was clear as daylight to the neighbours, but to us it still remains a mystery. Perhaps the reader knows what it meant. Then on another occasion we read: "Onions and Pigs For Sale." Why this curious collocation of onions and pigs? Colin suggested that, of course, the onions were to stuff the pigs with.

"And here's an idea," he continued. "Suppose we go in and buy a little suckling-pig and a string of onions. Then we will buy a yard of two of blue ribbon and tie it round the pig's neck, and you shall lead it along the road, weeping. I will walk behind it, with the onions, grinning from ear to ear. And when any one meets us, and asks the meaning of the strange procession, you will say: 'I am weeping because our little pig has to die!' And if any one says to me, 'Why are you grinning from ear to ear?' I shall answer, 'Because I am going to eat him. We are going to stuff him with onions at the next inn, and eat roast pig at the rising of the moon.'"

But we lacked courage to put our little joke into practice, fearing an insufficient appreciation of the fantastic in that particular region.

We were now making for Watkins, and had spent the night at Bradford, a particularly charming village almost lost amid the wooded hills of another lovely and s.p.a.cious valley, through which we had lyrically walked the day before. Bradford is a real country village, and was already all in a darkness smelling of cows and apples, when we groped for it among the woods the evening before. At starting out next morning, we inquired the way to Watkins of a storekeeper standing at his shop-door. He was in conversation with an acquaintance, and our questions occasioned a lively argument as to which was the better of two roads. The acquaintance was for the road through "Pine Creek," and he added, with a grim smile, "I guess I should know; I've travelled it often enough with a heavy load behind"; and the recollection of the rough hills he had gone b.u.mping over, all evidently fresh in his mind, seemed to give him a curious amus.e.m.e.nt. It transpired that he was an undertaker!

So we took the road to Pine Creek, but at the threshold of the village our fancy was taken by the particularly quaint white wooden meeting-house, surrounded on three sides with tie-up sheds for vehicles, each stall having a name affixed to it, like a pew: "P. Yawger," "A.W.

Gillum," "Pastor," and so on. Here the pious of the district tied up their buggies while they went within to pray, and these sacred stalls made a quaint picture for the imagination of outlying farmers driving to meeting over the hills on Sabbath mornings.

It was a beautiful morning of veiled suns.h.i.+ne, so warm that some hardy crickets chirped faintly as we went along. Once a blue jay came and looked at us, and the squirrels whirred among the chestnuts and hickories, and the roadsides were so thickly strewn with fallen nuts that we made but slow progress, stopping all the time to fill our pockets.

For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nut-crackers, and forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of cracking hickory-nuts. And we told each other that thus do grown sad men become boys again, by a woodside, of an October morning, cracking hickory-nuts, the world well lost.

CHAPTER XXI

OCTOBER ROSES AND A YOUNG GIRL'S FACE

The undertaker was certainly right about the road. I think he must have had a flash of poetic insight into our taste in roads. This was not, as a rule, understood by the friendly country folk. Their ideas and ours as to what const.i.tuted a good road differed beyond the possibility of harmonizing. When they said that a road was good they meant that it was straight, level, and businesslike. When they said that a road was bad they meant that it was rugged, rambling and picturesque. So, to their bewilderment, whenever we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always chose the bad. And, to get at what we really wanted, we learned to inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That we knew would be the road for us. From their point of view, the road we were on was as bad as could be; but, as I said, the undertaker evidently understood us, and had sent us into a region of whimsically sudden hills and rock and wooded wilderness, a swart country of lonely, rugged uplands, with but a solitary house here and there for miles. It was resting at the top of one of these hard-won acclivities that we came upon--and remember that it was the middle of October--two wild roses blooming by the roadside. This seems a fact worthy the attention of botanical societies, and I still have the roses pressed for the inspection of the learned between the pages of my travelling copy of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales."

A fact additionally curious was that the bush on which the flowers grew seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had these two been chosen, still, so late in the year, to hold up the tattered standard of Summer?

_Why, in the empty Autumn woods, And all the loss and end of things, Does one leaf linger on the tree; Why is it only one bird sings?

And why, across the aching field, Does one lone cricket chirrup on; Why one surviving b.u.t.terfly, With all its bright companions gone?

And why, when faces all about Whiten and wither hour by hour, Does one old face bloom on so sweet, As young as when it was a flower_?

The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States.

Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to concentrate in a murmuring hush, like a sh.e.l.l. A little boy sat by himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside. Here was another rose blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood. How had she come there, that beautiful child-woman in the solitude? By what caprice of the strange law of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this particular waste place of the earth?--for her face had surely come a long way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful things. Could she be a plain farmer's daughter, indigenous to that stubborn soil? No, surely she was not that, and yet--how had she come to be there? But these were questions we could not put to the schoolmarm.