October Vagabonds — Chapters 1-4

THE EPITAPH OF SUMMER

As I started out from the farm with a basket of potatoes, for our supper in the shack half a mile up the hillside, where we had made our Summer camp, my eye fell on a notice affixed to a gate-post, and, as I read it, my heart sank--sank as the sun was sinking yonder with wistful glory behind the purple ridge.

I tore the paper from the gate-post and put it in my pocket with a sigh.

"It is true, then," I said to myself.

"We have got to admit it.

I must show this to Colin."

Then I continued my way across the empty, close-gleaned corn-field, across the railway track, and, plunging into the orchard on the other side, where here and there among the trees the torrents of apples were being already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman, began to breast the hill intersected with thickly wooded watercourses.

High up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees, our log cabin lay hid, in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pails with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing our evening meal.

The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north.

A forlorn bird here and there made a thin piping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on the evening breeze.

Yes!

It was true.

Summer was beginning to pack up, the great stage-carpenter was about to change the scene, and the great theatre was full of echoes and sighs and sounds of farewell.

Of course, we had known it for some time, but had not had the heart to admit it to each other, could not find courage to say that one more golden Summer was at an end.

But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us no further shred of illusion.

There was an authoritative announcement there was no blinking, a notice to quit there was no gain-saying.

As I came to the crest of the hill, and in sight of the shack, shining with early lamp-light deep down among the trees of the gully, I could see Colin innocently at work on a salad, and hear him humming to himself his eternal "_Vive le Capitaine_."

It was too pathetic.

I believe the tears came to my eyes.

"Colin," I said, as I at length arrived and set down my basket of potatoes, "read this."

He took the paper from my hand and read: "_Sun-up Baseball Club.

September_ 19, 1908. _Last Match of the Season_" He knew what I meant.

"Yes!"

he said.

"It is the epitaph of Summer."

CHAPTER II AT EVENING I CAME TO THE WOOD

My solitude had been kindly lent to me for the Summer by a friend, the prophet-proprietor of a certain famous Well of Truth some four miles away, whither souls flocked from all parts of America to drink of the living waters.

I had been feeling town-worn and world-weary, and my friend had written me saying: "At Elim are twelve wells and seventy palm-trees," and so to Elim I had betaken myself.

After a brief sojourn there, drinking of the waters, and building up on the strong diet of the sage's living words, he had given me the key to some green woods and streams of his, and bade me take them for my hermitage.

I had a great making-up to arrange with Nature, and I half wondered how she would receive me after all this long time.

But when did that mother ever turn her face from her child, however truant from her care?

It had been with a beating heart that I had passed up the hillside on an evening in early June, and approached the hushed green temple, wherein I was to take Summer sanctuary from a wicked world.

But if, as I hope, the reader has no objection to an occasional interlude of verse in all this prose, I will copy for him here the poem I wrote next morning--it being always easier to tell the strict truth in poetry rather than in prose: _At evening I came to the wood, and threw myself on the breast Of the great green mother, weeping, and the arms of a thousand trees Waved and rustled in welcome, and murmured: "Rest--rest--rest!

The leaves, thy brothers, shall heal thee; thy sisters, the flowers, bring peace."

At length I stayed from my weeping, and lifted my face from the grass;

The moon was walking the wood with feet of mysterious pearl, And the great trees held their breath, trance-like, watching her pass, And a bird called out from the shadows, with voice as sweet as a girl.

And then, in the holy silence, to the great green mother I prayed: "Take me again to thy bosom, thy son who so close to thee, Aforetime, filial clung, then into the city strayed-- The painted face of the town, the wine and the harlotry.

"Bathe me in lustral dawns, and the morning star and the dew.

Make pure my heart as a bird and innocent as a flower, Make sweet my thoughts as the meadow-mint --O make me all anew, And in the strength of beech and oak gird up my will with power.

"I have wandered far, O my mother, but here I return at the last, Never again to stray in pilgrimage wanton and wild;

A broken heart and a contrite here at thy feet I cast, O take me back to thy bosom ..."

And the mother answered, "Child!"

_ It was a wonderful reconciliation, a wonderful home-coming, and how I luxuriated in the great green forgiveness!

Yes!

the giant maples had forgiven me, and the multitudinous beeches had taken me to their arms.

The flowers and I were friends again, the grass was my brother, and the shy nymph-like stream, dropping silver vowels into the silence, was my sweetheart.

CHAPTER III

"TRESPASSERS WILL BE..."

For those who value it, there is no form of property that inspires a sense of ownership so jealous as solitude.

Rob my orchard if you will, but beware how you despoil me of my silence.

The average noisy person can have no conception what a brutal form of trespass his coarsely cheerful voice may be in the exquisite spiritual hush of the woods, or what shattering discomfort his irrelevant presence in the landscape.

One day, to my horror, a picnic ruthlessly invaded my sanctuary.

With a roar of Boeotian hilarity, it tore up the hillside as if it were a storming party, and half a day the sacred woods were vocal with silly catcalls and snatches of profane song.

I locked up my hermitage, and, taking my stick, sought refuge in flight, like the other woodland creatures; only coming back at evening with cautious step and peering glance, half afraid lest it should still be there.

No!

It was gone, but its voices seemed to have left gaping wounds across the violated air, and the trees to wear a look of desecration.

But presently the moon arose and washed the solitude clean again, and the wounds of silence were healed in the still night.

Next morning I amused myself by writing the following notice, which I nailed up on a great elm-tree standing guard at the beginning of the woods: SILENCE!

_Speaking above a whisper in these woods is forbidden by law_.

This notice seems to have had its effect, for from this time on no more hands of marauders invaded my peace.

But I had one other case of trespass, of which it is now time to speak.

Some short distance from the shack was a clearing in the woods, a thriving wilderness of bramble-bushes, poke-berries, myrtle-berries, mandrakes, milkweed, mullein, daisies and what not--a paradise of every sauntering vine and splendid, saucy weed.

In the centre stood a sycamore-tree, beneath which it was my custom to smoke a morning pipe and revolve my profound after-breakfast thoughts.

Judge, then, of my indignant shock, one morning, at finding a stranger calmly occupying my place.

I stood for a moment rooted to the spot, in the shadow of the encircling woods, and he had not yet seen me.

As I stood, pondering on the best way of dealing with the intruder, a sudden revulsion of kindness stole over me.

For here indeed was a very different figure from what, in my first shock of surprise, I had expected to see.

No common intruder this.

In fact, who could have dreamed of coming upon so incongruous an apparition as this in an American woodland?

How on earth did this picturesque waif from the Quartier Latin come to stray so far away from the Boul' Miche!

For the little boyish figure of a man that sat sketching in my place was the Frenchiest-looking Frenchman you ever saw--with his dark, smoke-dried skin, his long, straight, blue-black hair, his fine, rather ferocious brown eyes, his long, delicate French nose, his bristling black moustache and short, sting-shaped imperial.

He wore on his head a soft white felt hat, somewhat of the shape affected by circus clowns, and too small for him.

His coat was of green velveteen corduroy and he wore knickerbockers of an eloquent plaid.

He was intently absorbed in sketching a prosperous group of weeds, a crazy quilt of wildly jostling colour, that had grown up around the decay of a fallen tree, and made a fine blazon of contrast against the massed foliage in the background.

There was no mistake how the stranger loved this patch of coloured weeds.

Here was a man whose whole soul was evidently--colour.

There was a look in his face as if he could just eat those oranges and purples, and soft greens; and there was a sort of passionate assurance in the way in which he handled his brushes, and delicately plunged them here and there in his colour-box, that spoke a master.

So intent was he upon his work that, when I came up behind him, he seemed unaware of my presence; though his oblivion was actually the conscious indifference of a landscape painter, accustomed to the ambling cow and the awe-struck peasant looking over his shoulder as he worked.

"Great bunch of weeds," he said presently, without looking up, and still painting, drawing the while at a quaint pipe about an inch long.

"O, you are not the Boul' Miche, after all," I exclaimed in disappointment.

"Aren't I, though?"

he said at last, looking up in interested surprise.

"Ever at--?"

mentioning the name of a well-known cafe, one of the many rally-points of the Quartier.

"I should say," I answered.

"Well!"

And thereupon we both plunged into delighted reminiscence of that city which, as none other, makes immediate friends of all her lovers.

For a while the woods faded away, and in that tangled clearing rose the towers of Notre Dame, and the Seine glittered on under its great bridges, and again the world smelled of absinthe, and picturesque madmen gesticulated in clouds of tobacco smoke, and propounded fantastic philosophies amid the rattle of dominoes--and afar off in the street a voice was crying "_Haricots verts_!"

My new friend's talk had the pathos of spiritual exile, for, as French in blood as a man could be, born in Bordeaux of Provençal parentage, he had lived most of his life in America.

The decoration of a rich man's house in the neighbourhood had brought him thus into my solitude, and, that work completed, he would return to his home in New York.

Meanwhile the morning was going by as we talked, and, putting up his sketch-box, he accepted my invitation to join me at lunch.

Such was the manner of my meeting, in the guise of a trespasser, with the dear friend to whom I had brought the decisive news of the death of Summer, as he was innocently making a salad, _in antiquam silvam_, on that sad September evening.

CHAPTER IV SALAD AND MOONSHINE

"Do you remember that first salad you made us, Colin?"

I said, as we sat over our coffee, and Colin was filling his little pipe.

"A daring work of art, a fantastic _tour de force_, of apples, and lettuce, and wild strawberries, and I don't know what else."

"I believe I mixed in some May-apples, too.

It was a great stunt ...

well, no more May-apples and strawberries this year," he finished, with a sigh, and we both sat silently smoking, thinking over the good Summer that was gone.

After our first meeting, Colin had dropped in to see me again from time to time, and when his work at the great house was finished, I had asked him to come and share my solitude.

A veritable child of Nature himself, he fitted into my quiet days as silently as a squirrel.

So much of his life had been passed out-of-doors with trees and skies, long dream-like days all alone sketching in solitary places, that he seemed as much a part of the woods as though he were a faun, and the lore of the elements, and all natural things--bugs and birds, all wildwood creatures--had passed into him with unconscious absorption.

A sort of boyish unconsciousness, indeed, was the keynote and charm of his nature.

A less sophisticated creature never followed the mystic calling of art.

Fortunately for me, he was not one of those painters who understand and expound their own work.

On the contrary, he was a perfect child about it, and painted for no more mysterious reason than that his eye delighted in beautiful natural effects, and that he loved to play with paint and brushes.

Though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed it from his talk.

"A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary mind.

But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your "sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way of seeing and saying it.

The moon rose as we smoked on, and began to lattice with silver the darkness of the glen, and flood the hillside with misty radiance.

Colin made for his sketch-box.

"I must make good use of this moon," he said, "before we go."

"And so must I," said I, laughing as we both went out into the night, he one way and I another, to make our different uses of the moon.

An hour later Colin turned in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight.

"How on earth did you do it?"

I said.

"It is as though you had drawn up the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well."

"No, no," he protested; "I know better.

But where is your _clair de lune_?"

"Nothing doing," I answered.

"Well, then, say those lines you wrote a week or two ago instead."

"'Berries already,' do you mean?"

"Yes."

Here are the lines he meant: _Berries already, September soon,-- The shortening day and ike early moon;

The year is busy with next year's flowers The seeds are ready for next year' showers;

Through a thousand tossing trees there swells The sigh of the Summer's sad farewells.

Too soon those leaves in the sunset sky Low down on the wintry ground will lie, And grim November and December Leave naught of Summer to remember-- Saving some flower in a book put by, Secure from the soft effacing snow, Though all the rest of the Summer go.

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