October Vagabonds — Chapters 9-12

DUTCH HOLLOW

The day had opened with a restless picturesque morning of gusty sunshine 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 furnishing 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 massing 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 grasses.

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 slashings 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 assured 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 passages 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 clustered 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, muffled 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 glass 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, goddess 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 shine 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 assured 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 circumstance of our doors having no knobs 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-knobs 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 flashing 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 assembled, 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 comradeship.

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 trimming 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 space 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 scraped--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?

But--who knows?

--perhaps the dead prefer to be up-to-date, and to follow the fashion in funeral furnishings; 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 Düsseldorf, and his worn face lit up when he found that Colin had been at Düsseldorf 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 sunshine, 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 spacious morning of windswept sunshine, 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 space, a field of buckwheat standing in ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple orchards which clustered 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 passing 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 débris 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 spacious, 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 grass, 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 appetite.

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 cockcrow 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 apron, 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 sunshine 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 passed and repassed 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 passed 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 threshing-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 threshing-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 chinks is found the toad, and all the swarming vermin that are bred in earth;

and the weevil, and the ant that fears a destitute 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 participation 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 companionship.

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 "Premières Poésies."

Baedeker's "United States."

Road Map of New York State.