October Vagabonds - Richard Le Gallienne
OCTOBER VAGABONDS
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
1911
I The Epitaph of Summer
II At Evening I Came to the Wood
III "Trespassers will be ..."
IV Salad and Moonshine
V The Green Friend
VI In the Wake of Summer
VII Maps and Farewells
VIII The American Bluebird and Its Song
IX Dutch Hollow
X Where They Sing from Morning Till Night
XI Apple-Land
XII Orchards and a Line from Virgil
XIII Fellow Wayfarers
XIV The Old Lady of the Walnuts and Others
XV The Man at Dansville
XVI In which we Catch up with Summer
XVII Containing Valuable Statistics
XVIII A Dithyrambus of Buttermilk
XIX A Growl about American Country Hotels
XX Onions, Pigs and Hickory-nuts
XXI October Roses and a Young Girl's Face
XXII Concerning the Popular Taste in Scenery and some Happy People
XXIII The Susquehanna
XXIV And Unexpectedly the Last
Envoi
CHAPTER I
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
Provencal 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._
CHAPTER V
THE GREEN FRIEND
Though we had received such unmistakable notice to quit, we still
lingered on in our solitude, after the manner of defiant tenants whom
nothing short of corporal ejection can dislodge. The North wind began to
roar in the tree-tops and shake the doors and windows of the shack, like
an angry landlord, but we paid no heed to him. Yet, all the time, both of
us, in our several ways, were saying our farewells, and packing up our
memories for departure. There was an old elm-tree which Colin had taken
for his Summer god, and which he was never tired of painting. He must
make the one perfect study of that before we pulled up stakes. So, each
day, after our morning adoration of the sun, we would separate about our
different ways and business.
The woods were already beginning to wear a wistful, dejected look. There
was a feeling of departure everywhere, a sense that the year's
excitements were over. The procession had gone by, and there was an
empty, purposeless air of waiting-about upon things, a sort of despairing
longing for something else to happen--and a sure sense that nothing more
could happen till next year. Every event in the floral calendar had taken
place with immemorial punctuality and tragic rapidity. All the
full-blooded flowers of Summer had long since come and gone, with their
magic faces and their souls of perfume. Gone were the banners of blossom
from the great trees. The locust and the chestnut, those spendthrifts of
the woods, that went the pace so gorgeously in June, are now sober-coated
enough, and growing even threadbare. All the hum and the honey and
breathless bosom-beat of things is over. The birds sing no more, but only
chatter about time-tables. The bee keeps to his hive, and the bewildered
butterfly, in tattered ball-dress, wonders what has become of his flowery
partners. The great cricket factory has shut down. Not a wheel is heard
whirring. The squirrel has lost his playful air, and has an anxious
manner, as though there were no time to waste before stocking his
granary. Everywhere berries have taken the place of buds, and bearded
grasses the place of flowers. Even the goldenrod has fallen to rust, and
the stars of the aster are already tarnished. Only along the edges of the
wood the dry little paper immortelles spread long shrouds and wreaths in
the shade.
Suddenly you feel lonely in the woods, which had seemed so companionable
all Summer. What is it--_Who_ is it--that has gone? Though quite alone,
there was some one with you all Summer, an invisible being filling the
woods with his presence, and always at your side, or somewhere near by.
But to-day, through all the green halls and chambers of the wood, you
seek him in vain. You call, but there is no answer. You wait, but he does
not come. He has gone. The wood is an empty palace. The prince went away
secretly in the night. The wood is a deserted temple. The god has betaken
himself to some secret abode. Everywhere you come upon chill, abandoned
altars, littered debris of Summer sacrifices. Maybe he is dead, and
perchance, deeper in the wood, you may come upon his marble form in a
winding-sheet of drifting leaves.
Not a god, maybe, you have pictured him, not a prince, but surely as a
friend--the mysterious Green Friend of the green silence and the golden
hush of Summer noons. The mysterious Green Friend of the woods! So
strangely by our side all Summer, so strangely gone away. It is in vain
to await him under our morning sycamore, nor under the great maples shall
we find him walking, nor amid the alder thickets discover him, nor yet in
the little ravine beneath the pines. No! he has surely gone away, and his
great house seems empty without him, desolate, filled with lamentation,
all its doors and windows open to the Winter snows.
But the Green Friend had left me a message. I found it at the roots of
some violets. "_I shall be back again next year_" he said.
CHAPTER VI
IN THE WAKE OF SUMMER
Yes, it was time to be going, and the thought was much on both our minds.
We had as yet, however, made no plans, had not indeed discussed any; but
one afternoon, late in September, driven indoors by a sudden squall of
rain, I came to Colin with an idea. The night before we had had the first
real storm of the season.
"Ah! This will do their business," Colin had said, referring to the
trees, as we heard the wind and rain tearing and splashing through the
pitch-dark woods. "It will be a different world in the morning."
And indeed it was. Cruel was the work of dismantling that had gone on
during the night. The roof of the wood had fallen in in a score of
places, letting in the sky through unfamiliar windows; and the distant
prospect showed through the torn tapestry of the trees with a startling
sense of disclosure. The dishevelled world wore the distressed look of a
nymph caught _deshabillee._ The expression, "the naked woods," occurred
to one with almost a sense of impropriety. At least there was a cynical
indecorum in this violent disrobing of the landscape.
"Colin," I said, coming to him with my idea. "We've got to go, of
course, but I've been thinking--don't you hate the idea of being hurled
along in a train, and suddenly shot into the city again, like a package
through a tube?"
"Hate it? Don't ask me," said Colin.
"If only it could be more gradual," I went on. "Suppose, for instance,
instead of taking the train, we should walk it!"
"Walk to New York?" said Colin, with a surprised whistle.
"Yes! Why not?"
"Something of a walk, old man."
"All the better. We shall be all the longer getting there. But, listen.
To go by train would be almost too sudden a shock. I don't believe we
could stand it. To be here to-day, breathing this God's fresh air, living
the lives of natural men in a natural world, and to-morrow--Broadway, the
horrible crowds, the hustle, the dirt, the smells, the uproar."
For answer Colin watched the clean rain fleeting through the trees, and
groaned aloud.
"But now if we walked, we would, so to say, let ourselves down lightly,
inure ourselves by gradual approach to the thought of life once more with
our fellows. Besides, we should be walking in the wake of the Summer. She
has only moved a little East as yet. We might catch her up on her way to
New York, and thus move with the moving season, keeping in step with the
Zodiac. Then, at last, ... how much more fitting our entry into New York,
not by way of some sordid and clangorous depot, but through the spacious
corridors of the Highlands and the lordly gates of the Hudson!"
When I had thus attained my crescendo, Colin rose impressively, and
embraced me with true French effusion.
"Old man," he said, "that's just great. It's an inspiration from on high.
It makes me feel better already. Gee! but that's bully."
French as was his blood, it will be observed that Colin's expletives were
thoroughly American. Of course, he should have said _sacre mille cochons_
or _nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu_; but, though in appearance, so to say, an
embodied "_sacre"_ he seemed to find the American vernacular sufficiently
expressive.
"Is it a go, then?" said I.
"It's a go," said Colin, once more in American.
And we shook on it.
CHAPTER VII
MAPS AND FAREWELLS
It was wonderful what a change our new plan wrought in our spirits.
Our melancholy was immediately dispersed, and its place taken by active
anticipations of our journey. The North wind in the trees, instead of
blustering dismissal, sounded to our ears like the fluttering of the
blue-peter at the masthead of our voyage. Strange heart of man! A day
back we were in tears at the thought of going. Now we are all smiles to
think of it, all impatience to be gone. We quote Whitman a dozen times
in the hour, and it is all "afoot and light-hearted" with us, and "the
open road."
But there were some farewells to make to people as well as to trees.
There were friends at Elim to bid adieu, and also there were maps to be
consulted, and knapsacks to be packed--exhilarating preparations.
Our friends looked at us, when we had unfolded our project, with a
mixture of surprise and pity. "Amiable lunatics" was the first comment of
their countenances, and--"There never was any telling what the artistic
temperament would do next!" Had we announced an air-ship voyage to the
moon, they would have regarded us as comparatively reasonable, but to
walk--_to walk_--some four or five hundred miles in America, of all
countries, a country of palace cars and, lightning limited expresses, not
to mention homicidal touring automobiles, seemed like--what shall I
say?--well, as though one should start out for New Zealand in a row-boat,
or make the trip to St. Petersburg in a sedan-chair.
But there were others--especially the women--who understood, felt as we
did, and longed to go with us. I have never met a woman yet whose face
did not light up at the thought of a walking tour, and in her heart long
to don Rosalind clothes and set forth in search of adventures. We thus
had the advantage, in planning our route, of several prettily coiffed
heads bending over our maps and guide-books with us.
"Four hundred and thirty miles," said one of these Rosalinds, whose
pretty head was full of pictures of romantic European travel. "Think what
one could do with four hundred and thirty miles in Europe. Let us try,
for the fun of it."