October Vagabonds — Chapters 17-20

CHAPTER XVII CONTAINING VALUABLE STATISTICS

And the morning was like unto the evening.

Summer was still to be our companion, and, as the evening of our coming to Cohocton had been the most dreamlike of all the ends of our walking days--had, so to say, been most evening-spiritual, so the morning of our Cohocton seemed most morning-spiritual of all our mornings, most filled with strange hope and thrill and glitter.

We were afoot earlier than usual.

The sun had hardly risen, and the shining mists still wreathed the great hill which overhangs the village.

We were for calling it a mountain, but we were told that it lacked fifty feet of being a mountain.

You are not a mountain till you grow to a thousand feet.

Our mountain was only some nine hundred and fifty feet.

Therefore, it was only entitled to be called a hill.

I love information--don't you, dear reader?

--though, to us humble walking delegates of the ideal, it was all one.

But I know for certain that it was a lane of young maples which made our avenue of light-hearted departure out of the village, though I cannot be sure of the names of all the trees of the thick woods which clothed the hillside beneath which our road lay, a huge endless hillside all dripping and sparkling, and alive with little rills, facing a broad plain, a sea of feathery grass almost unbearably beautiful with soft glittering dew and opal mists, out of which rose spectral elms, like the shadows of gigantic Shanghai roosters.

All about was the sound of brooks musically rippling from the hills, and there was a chaste chill in the air, as befitted the time of day, for _Maiden still the morn is, and strange she is, and secret, Her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells_.

It was all so beautiful that an old thought came back to me that I often had as a child, when I used to be taken among mysterious mountains, for Summer holidays: Do people really live in such beautiful places all the year round?

Do they live there just like ordinary people in towns, go about ordinary businesses, live ordinary lives?

It seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, that such places should be kept sacred, like fairyland, or should, at least, be the background of high and romantic action, like the scenery in operas.

To think of a valley so beautiful as that through which we were walking being put to any other use than that of beauty seems preposterous; but do you know what that beautiful valley was doing, while Colin and I were thus poetizing it, adoring its outlines and revelling in its tints?

It was just quietly growing potatoes.

Yes!

we had mostly passed through the apple country.

This garden of Eden, this Vale of Enna, was a great potato country.

And we learned, too, that its inhabitants were by no means so pleased with beautiful Cohoctori Valley as we were.

Here, we gathered, was another beautiful ne'er-do-well of Nature, too occupied with her good looks to be fit for much else than prinking herself out with wild-flowers, and falling into graceful attitudes before her mirror--and there were mirrors in plenty, many streams and willows, in Cohocton Valley; everywhere, for us, the mysterious charm of running water.

Once this idle daughter of Ceres used to grow wheat, wheat "in great plenty," but now she could be persuaded to grow nothing but potatoes.

All this and much more we learned from a friend who drew up beside us in a buggy, as I was drinking from a gleaming thread of water gliding down a mossed conduit of hollowed tree-trunks into an old cauldron sunk into the hillside, and long since turned in ferns and lichen.

Colin was seated near by making a sketch, as I drank.

"I wouldn't drink too much of that water, lads," said the friendly voice of the dapper little intelligent-faced man in the buggy.

What!

not drink this fairy water?

"Why, you country folk are as afraid of fresh water as you are of fresh air," I answered, laughing.

"All right, it's up to you--but it's been a dry Summer, you know."

And then the little man's attention was taken by Colin.

"Sketching?"

he asked, and then he said, half shyly, "Would you mind my taking a look how you do it?"

and, climbing down from his buggy, he came and looked over Colin's shoulder.

"I used to try my hand at it a bit when I was a boy, but those blamed trees always beat me ...

don't bother you much, seemingly though," he added, as he watched Colin's pencil with the curiosity of a child.

"I've a little girl at home who does pretty well," he continued after a moment, "but you've certainly got her skinned.

I wish she could see you doing it."

His delight in a form of skill which has always been as magical to me as it seemed to him, was charmingly boyish, and Colin turned over his sketch-book, and showed him the notes he had made as we went along.

One of a stump fence particularly delighted him--those stump fences made out of the roots of pine trees set side by side, which had been a feature of the country some miles back, and which make such a weird impression on the landscape, like rows of gigantic black antlers, or many-armed Hindoo idols, or a horde of Zulus in fantastic war-gear drawn up in battle-array, or the blackened stumps of giants' teeth--Colin and I tried all those images and many more to express the curious weird effect of coming upon them in the midst of a green and smiling landscape.

"Well, lads," he said, after we had talked awhile, "I shall have to be going.

But you've given me a great deal of pleasure.

Can't I give you a lift in exchange?

I guess there is room for the three of us."

Now Colin and I, on the occasion of our ride with the apple-farmer, awhile back, had held subtle casuistical debate on the legitimacy of men ostensibly, not to say ostentatiously, on foot to New York picking up chance rides in this way.

The argument had gone into pursuit of very fine distinctions, and almost rivalled in its casuistry the famous old Duns Scotus--or was it Thomas Aquinas?

--debate as to how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.

Once we had come to a deadlock as to the kind of vehicle from which it was proper to accept such hospitality.

Perhaps it was a Puritan scrupulousness in my blood that had made me take the stand that four-wheeled vehicles, such as wagons, hay-carts and the like, being slow-moving, were permissible, but that buggies, or any form of rapid two-wheeled vehicle, were not.

To this Colin had retorted that, on that basis, a tally-ho would be all right, or even an automobile.

So the argument had wrestled from side to side, and finally we had compromised.

We agreed that an occasional buggy would be within the vagabond law and that any vehicle, other, of course, than an automobile, which was not plying for hire--such as a trolley or a local train--might on occasion be gratefully climbed into.

Thus it was that we hesitated a moment at the offer of our friend, a hesitancy we amused him by explaining as, presently, conscience-clear, we rattled with him through the hills.

He was an interesting talker, a human-hearted, keen-minded man, and he had many more topics as well as potatoes.

Besides, he was not in the potato business, but, as with our former friend, his beautiful business was apples.

Still, he talked very entertainingly about potatoes; telling us, among other things, that, so friendly was the soil toward that particular vegetable that it yielded as much as a hundred to a hundred and fifty bushels to the acre, and that a fair-sized potato farm thereabouts, properly handled, would pay for itself in a year.

I transcribe this information, not merely because I think that, among so many words, the reader is fairly entitled to expect some little information, but chiefly for the benefit of a friend of mine, the like of whom, no doubt, the reader counts among his acquaintances.

The friend I mean has a mind so quaintly voracious of facts that, often when we have been dining together at one of the great hotels, he would speculate, say, looking round the room filled with eager diners, on how many clams are nightly consumed in New York City, or how many millions of fresh eggs New York requires each morning for breakfast.

So when next I dine with him I will say, as he asks me about my trip: "Do you know that in the Cohocton Valley they raise as much as one hundred to one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes to the acre?"

And he will say: "You don't really mean to say so?"

I have in my private note-book much more such tabulated information which I picked up and hoarded for his entertainment, just as whenever a letter comes to me from abroad, I tear off the stamp and save it for a little girl I love.

But, as I said, our friend in the buggy was by no means limited to potatoes for his conversation.

He was learned in the geography of the valley and told us how once the Cohocton River, now merely a decorative stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway, how it was once busy with mills, and how men used to raft down it as far as Elmira.

But "the springs were drying up."

I liked the mysterious sound of that, and still more his mysterious story of an undercurrent from the Great Lakes that runs beneath the valley.

I seemed to hear the sound of its strange subterranean flow as he talked.

Such is the fun of knowing so little about the world.

The simplest fact out of a child's geography thus comes to one new and marvellous.

Well, we had to say good-bye at last to our friend at a cross-road, and we left him learnedly discussing the current prices of apples with a business acquaintance who had just driven up--Kings, Rambos, Baldwins, Greenings, and Spigs.

And, by the way, in packing apples into barrels, you must always pack them--stems down.

Be careful to remember that.

CHAPTER XVIII A DITHYRAMBUS OF BUTTEEMILK

One discovery of some importance you make in walking the roads is the comparative rarity and exceeding preciousness of buttermilk.

We had, as I said, caught up with Summer.

Summer, need one say, is a thirsty companion, and the State seemed suddenly to have gone dry.

We looked in vain for magic mirrors by the roadside, overhung with fairy grasses, littered with Autumn leaves, and skated over by nimble water-bugs.

As our friend had said, the springs seemed to have dried up.

Now and again we would hail with a great cry a friendly pump; once we came upon a cider-mill, but it was not working, and time and again we knocked and asked in vain for buttermilk.

Sometimes, but not often, we found it.

Once we met a genial old man just leaving his farm door, and told him that we were literally dying for a drink of buttermilk.

Our expression seemed to tickle him.

"Well!"

he said, laughing, "it shall never be said that two poor creatures passed my door, and died for lack of a glass of buttermilk," and he brought out a huge jug, for which he would accept nothing but our blessings.

He seemed to take buttermilk lightly; but, one evening, we came upon another old farmer to whom buttermilk seemed a species of the water of life to be hoarded jealously and doled out in careful quantities at strictly market rates.

In town one imagines that country people give their buttermilk to the pigs.

At any rate, they didn't give it to us.

We paid that old man twenty cents, for we drank two glasses apiece.

And first we had knocked at the farm door, and told our need to a pretty young woman, who answered, with some hesitancy, that she would call "father."

She seemed to live in some awe of "father," as we well understood when a tall, raw-boned, stern, old man, of the caricature "Brother Jonathan" type, appeared grimly, making an iron sound with a great bunch of keys.

On hearing our request, he said nothing, but, motioning to us to follow, stalked across the farmyard to a small building under a great elm-tree.

There were two steps down to the door, and it had a mysterious appearance.

It might have been a family vault, a dynamite magazine, or the Well at the World's End.

It was the strong-room of the milk; and, when the grim old guardian of the dairy unlocked the door, with a sound of rusty locks and falling bolts, there, cool and cloistral, were the fragrant pans and bowls, the most sacred vessels of the farm.

"_She bathed her body many a time In fountains filled with milk_."

I hummed to Colin; but I took care that the old man didn't hear me.

And we agreed, as we went on again along the road, that he did right to guard well and charge well for so noble and so innocent a drink.

Indeed, the old fellow's buttermilk was so good that I think it must have gone to my head.

In no other way can I account for the following dithyrambic song: _Let whoso will sing Bacchus' vine, We know a drink that's more divine;

'Tis white and innocent as doves, Fragrant and bosom-white as love's White bosom on a Summer day, And fragrant as the hawthorn spray.

Let Dionysus and his crew, Garlanded, drain their fevered brew, And in the orgiastic bowl Drug and besot the sacred soul;

This simple country cup we drain Knows not the ghosts of sin and pain, No fates or furies follow him Who sips from its cream-mantled rim.

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 space 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 assuredly 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 fashion: "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 passer-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 circumstances"; 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 button 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 amusement 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 spacious 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 bumping over, all evidently fresh in his mind, seemed to give him a curious amusement.

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 sunshine, 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.