Part 1 (1/2)
October Vagabonds.
by Richard Le Gallienne.
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 b.u.t.tonwood 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 gra.s.ses, 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s; The moon was walking the wood with feet of mysterious pearl, And the great trees held their breath, trance-like, watching her pa.s.s, And a bird called out from the shadows, with voice as sweet as a girl.