I couldn"t help laughing. Poor people!
"You might," I said, "apply for Mrs. Heney"s place."
"Who is Mrs. Heney?" asked Mrs. Starkweather.
"You don"t mean to say that you never heard of Mrs. Heney!" I exclaimed.
"Mrs. Heney, who is now Mrs. "Penny" Daniels? You"ve missed one of our greatest celebrities."
With that, of course, I had to tell them about Mrs. Heney, who has for years performed a most important function in this community. Alone and unaided she has been the poor whom we are supposed to have always with us. If it had not been for the devoted faithfulness of Mrs. Heney at Thanksgiving, Christmas and other times of the year, I suppose our Woman"s Aid Society and the King"s Daughters would have perished miserably of undistributed turkeys and tufted comforters. For years Mrs.
Heney filled the place most acceptably. Curbing the natural outpourings of a rather jovial soul she could upon occasion look as deserving of charity as any person that ever I met. But I pitied the little Heneys: it always comes hard on the children. For weeks after every Thanksgiving and Christmas they always wore a painfully stuffed and suffocated look.
I only came to appreciate fully what a self-sacrificing public servant Mrs. Heney really was when I learned that she had taken the desperate alternative of marrying "Penny" Daniels.
"So you think we might possibly aspire to the position?" laughed Mrs.
Starkweather.
Upon this I told them of the trouble in our household and asked them to come down and help us enjoy Dr. McAlway and the goose.
When I left, after much more pleasant talk, they both came with me to the door seeming greatly improved in spirits.
"You"ve given us something to live for, Mr. Grayson," said Mrs.
Starkweather.
So I walked homeward in the highest spirits, and an hour or more later who should we see in the top of our upper field but Mr. Starkweather and his wife floundering in the snow. They reached the lane literally covered from top to toe with snow and both of them ruddy with the cold.
"We walked over," said Mrs. Starkweather breathlessly, "and I haven"t had so much fun in years."
Mr. Starkweather helped her over the fence. The Scotch Preacher stood on the steps to receive them, and we all went in together.
I can"t pretend to describe Harriet"s dinner: the gorgeous brown goose, and the apple sauce, and all the other things that best go with it, and the pumpkin pie at the end--the finest, thickest, most delicious pumpkin pie I ever ate in all my life. It melted in one"s mouth and brought visions of celestial bliss. And I wish I could have a picture of Harriet presiding. I have never seen her happier, or more in her element. Every time she brought in a new dish or took off a cover it was a sort of miracle. And her coffee--but I must not and dare not elaborate.
And what great talk we had afterward!
I"ve known the Scotch Preacher for a long time, but I never saw him in quite such a mood of hilarity. He and Mr. Starkweather told stories of their boyhood--and we laughed, and laughed--Mrs. Starkweather the most of all. Seeing her so often in her carriage, or in the dignity of her home, I didn"t think she had so much jollity in her. Finally she discovered Harriet"s cabinet organ, and nothing would do but she must sing for us.
"None of the new-fangled ones, Clara," cried her husband: "some of the old ones we used to know."
So she sat herself down at the organ and threw her head back and began to sing:
"Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day----,"
Mr. Starkweather jumped up and ran over to the organ and joined in with his deep voice. Harriet and I followed. The Scotch Preacher"s wife nodded in time with the music, and presently I saw the tears in her eyes. As for Dr. McAlway, he sat on the edge of his chair with his hands on his knees and wagged his s.h.a.ggy head, and before we got through he, too, joined in with his big sonorous voice:
"Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art----,"
Oh, I can"t tell here--it grows late and there"s work to-morrow--all the things we did and said. They stayed until it was dark, and when Mrs.
Starkweather was ready to go, she took both of Harriet"s hands in hers and said with great earnestness:
"I haven"t had such a good time at Christmas since I was a little girl.
I shall never forget it."
And the dear old Scotch Preacher, when Harriet and I had wrapped him up, went out, saying:
"This has been a day of pleasant bread."
It has; it has. I shall not soon forget it. What a lot of kindness and common human nature--childlike simplicity, if you will--there is in people once you get them down together and persuade them that the things they think serious are not serious at all.
III
THE OPEN ROAD
"To make s.p.a.ce for wandering is it that the world was made so wide."
--GOETHE, _Wilhelm Meister_.
I love sometimes to have a day alone--a riotous day. Sometimes I do not care to see even my best friends: but I give myself up to the full enjoyment of the world around me. I go out of my door in the morning--preferably a sunny morning, though any morning will do well enough--and walk straight out into the world. I take with me the burden of no duty or responsibility. I draw in the fresh air, odour-laden from orchard and wood. I look about me as if everything were new--and behold everything _is_ new. My barn, my oaks, my fences--I declare I never saw them before. I have no preconceived impressions, or beliefs, or opinions. My lane fence is the end of the known earth. I am a discoverer of new fields among old ones. I see, feel, hear, smell, taste all these wonderful things for the first time. I have no idea what discoveries I shall make!
So I go down the lane, looking up and about me. I cross the town road and climb the fence on the other side. I brush one shoulder among the bushes as I pa.s.s: I feel the solid yet easy pressure of the sod. The long blades of the timothy-gra.s.s clasp at my legs and let go with reluctance. I break off a twig here and there and taste the tart or bitter sap. I take off my hat and let the warm sun shine on my head. I am an adventurer upon a new earth.
Is it not marvellous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness. For want of that ardent inner curiosity which is the only true foundation for the appreciation of beauty--for beauty is inward, not outward--we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere curious resemblances which, like una.s.similated property, possess no power of fecundation. With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and pa.s.ses in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain cathedrals!
Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach? For wilderness, for foreignness, I have no need to go a mile: I have only to come up through my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside--and behold, a new heaven and a new earth!
Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we look the roads are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps!
It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening before my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there. Naming things! Objects fall into categories for them and wear little sure channels in the brain. A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to them, a field forever a field. Life solidifies itself in words. And finally how everything wearies them and that is old age!
Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?--is not that the best life we know?
And so to the Open Road! Not many miles from my farm there is a tamarack swamp. The soft dark green of it fills the round bowl of a valley.
Around it spread rising forests and fields; fences divide it from the known land. Coming across my fields one day, I saw it there. I felt the habit of avoidance. It is a custom, well enough in a practical land, to shun such a spot of perplexity; but on that day I was following the Open Road, and it led me straight to the moist dark stillness of the tamaracks. I cannot here tell all the marvels I found in that place. I trod where human foot had never trod before. Cobwebs barred my pa.s.sage (the bars to most pa.s.sages when we came to them are only cobwebs), the earth was soft with the thick swamp mosses, and with many an autumn of fallen dead, brown leaves. I crossed the track of a muskrat, I saw the nest of a hawk--and how, how many other things of the wilderness I must not here relate. And I came out of it renewed and refreshed; I know now the feeling of the pioneer and the discoverer. Peary has no more than I; Stanley tells me nothing I have not experienced!
What more than that is the accomplishment of the great inventor, poet, painter? Such cannot abide habit-hedged wildernesses. They follow the Open Road, they see for themselves, and will not accept the paths or the names of the world. And Sight, kept clear, becomes, curiously, Insight.
A thousand had seen apples fall before Newton. But Newton was dowered with the spirit of the Open Road!
Sometimes as I walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience with scarcely diminished emotion.
And one of these words--how it brings to me the very mood of a gray October day! A sleepy west wind blowing. The fields are bare, the corn shocks brown, and the long road looks flat and dull. Away in the marsh I hear a single melancholy crow. A heavy day, namelessly sad! Old sorrows flock to one"s memory and old regrets. The creeper is red in the swamp and the gra.s.s is brown on the hill. It comes to me that I was a boy once----
So to the flat road and away! And turn at the turning and rise with the hill. Will the mood change: will the day? I see a lone man in the top of a pasture crying "Coo-ee, coo-ee." I do not see at first why he cries and then over the hill come the ewes, a dense gray flock of them, huddling toward me. The yokel behind has a stick in each hand. "Coo-ee, coo-ee," he also cries. And the two men, gathering in, threatening, sidling, advancing slowly, the sheep turning uncertainly this way and that, come at last to the boarded pen.
"That"s the idee," says the helper.
"A poor lot," remarks the leader: "such is the farmer"s life."
From the roadway they back their frame-decked wagon to the fence and unhook their team. The leader throws off his coat and stands thick and muscular in his blue jeans--a roistering fellow with a red face, thick neck and chapped hands.