Part 10

I hung up the receiver and sat a moment, dazed, looking out at the reek of weather. Then I shook myself and darted upstairs to the hunting-closet. In half an hour the bag was packed and Jonathan was at the door. In an hour we were on the train, and at twilight we were tramping out into a fog-swept marsh. Grayness was all around us; underfoot was mud, glimmering patches of soft snow, and the bristly stubble of the close-cut marsh grass.

"What fools we are!" I murmured.

"Why?" said Jonathan contentedly.

"Oh, if you can't see--" I said.

And then, suddenly, as we walked, my whole attitude changed. The weather, as weather, seemed something that belonged in a city--very far away, and no concern of mine. This wasn't weather, here where we walked; it was a gray and boundless world of mystery. We raised our heads high and breathed long, deep breaths as the fog drifted against our faces. We were aware of dim masses of huddling bushes, blurred outlines of sheds and fences. Then only the level marsh stretched out before us and around us.

"Can we find our way out again?" I murmured, though without real anxiety.

"Probably," said Jonathan. "Isn't it great! You feel as if you had a soul out here! By the way, what was it you said about fools?"

"I forget," I said.

We went on and on, I don't know just where or how long, until we came to the creek, where the tide sets in and out. I should have walked into it if Jonathan hadn't held me back. As we followed it, there rose a hoarse, raucous "_Ngwak! ngwak! ngwak!_" and a great rush of wings. Jonathan dropped on one knee, gun up, but we saw nothing.

"We'll settle down here," he said. "There'll be more coming in soon. Wait a minute--hold my gun." He disappeared in the fog, and came back with an armful of hay, taken from the heart of a haystack of whose existence he seemed, by some sixth or seventh sense, to be aware. "There! That'll keep you off the real marsh. Now settle down, and don't move, and listen with all your ears, and be ready. I'll go off a little way."

I sank down on the hay, and watched him melt into the grayness. I was alone in the dim marsh. There was no wind, no sound but the far-off whistle and rush of a train. I lay there and thought of nothing. I let myself be absorbed into the twilight. I did not even feel that I had a soul. I was nothing but a point of consciousness in the midst of a gray infinity.

Suddenly I was aware of a sound--a rapid pulsing of soft, high tone--too soft for a whistle, too high for a song,--pervasive, elusive; it was overhead, it was beside me, behind me, where? Ah--it was wings! The winnowing of wings! I half rose, grasping my gun, with a sense of responsibility to Jonathan. But my vision was caught in the grayness as in a web. The sound grew clearer, then fainter, then it passed away. The twilight gathered, and the fog partly dissolved. A fine rain began to fall, and in the intense silence I could hear the faint pricking of the drops on the stiff marsh stubble. I had thought the patter of rain on a roof was the stillest sound I knew, but this was stiller. Again came the winnowing of wings--again and again; and sometimes I was able to see the dark shapes passing overhead and vanishing almost before they appeared. Now and then I heard the muffled, flat sound of Jonathan's gun--he was evidently living up to his opportunities better than I was. Occasionally, in a spasm of activity, I shot too.

Until night closed in about us that sound of wings filled the air, and I knelt, listening and watching. It is strange how one can be physically alert while yet one's soul is withdrawn, quiet and receptive. Out of this state, as out of a trance, I was roused by the sense of Jonathan's dim bulk, seeming "larger than mortal," as he emerged from the night.

"Cold?" he said.

"I don't know--no, of course I'm not." I found it hard to lay hold on clear ideas again.

"I heard you shoot. Get any?"

"I think I hurried them a little."

We started back. At least I suppose it was back, because after a while we came to the road we had left. I was conscious only of bewildering patches of snow that lay like half-veiled moonlight on the dark stretches of the marsh. At last a clump of cedars made themselves felt rather than seen. "There's the fence corner! We're all right," said Jonathan. A snow-filled horse rut gave faint guidance, the twigs of the hedgerow lightly felt of our faces as we passed. We found the main road, and it led us through the quiet, fog-bound village, whose house lights made tiny blurs on the mist, to the hot, bright little station. Then came the close, flaringly lighted car, and people--commuters--getting on and off, talking about the "weather," and filling the car with the smell of wet newspapers and umbrellas. We had returned to the land of "weather." Yet it did not really touch us. It seemed a dream. The reality was the marsh, with its fog and its pricking raindrops and its sentinel cedars, its silence and its wings.

In the days that followed, the fog passed, and there were long, warm rains. The marsh called us, but we could not go. Then the sky cleared, the wind rose, the mercury began to drop. Jonathan looked across the luncheon table and said, "What about ducks?"

"Can you get off?" I asked joyously.

"I can't, but I will," he replied.

And this time-- Did I think I knew the marsh? Did I suppose, having seen it at dawn in the fall days when the sun still rises early, having seen it in winter twilight, fog-beset, that I knew it? Do I suppose I know it now? At least I know it better, having seen it under a clearing sky, when the cold wind sweeps it clean, and the air, crystalline, seems like a lens through which one looks and sees a revelation of new things.

As we struck into the marsh, just at sundown, my first thought was a rushing prayer for words, for colors, for something to catch and hold the beauty of it. But there are no words, no colors. No one who has not seen it can know what a New England shore marsh can be in winter under a golden sky.

Winter does some things for us that summer cannot do. Summer gives us everything all at once--color, fragrance, line, sound--in an overwhelming exuberance of riches. And it is good. But winter-- Ah, winter is an artist, winter has reserves; he selects, he emphasizes, he interprets. Winter says, "I will give you nothing to-day but brown and white, but I will glorify these until you shall wonder that there can be any beauty except thus." And again winter says: "Did you think the world was brown and white? Lo, it is blue and rose and silver--nothing else!" And we look, and it is so. On that other evening, in the fog, the world had been all gray--black-gray and pale gray and silver gray. On this evening winter said: "Gray? Not at all. You shall have brown and gold. Behold and marvel!"

I marveled. There was a sweep of golden marsh, under a gold sky, and at its borders low lines of trees etched in rich brown masses, and my sentinel cedars standing singly or by twos and threes--cedars in their winter tones of olive brown, dull almost to harshness, holding themselves stiffly against the great wind, yielding only at their delicate tips when the gusts came, recovering again in the lulls, to point dauntlessly skyward. The narrow boundary ditches, already glassing over in the sudden cold, stretched away in rigid lines, flashing back the light of the sky in shivers of gold. The haystacks reiterated the color notes--gold on their sunset side, deep brown on their shadowed one.

There is a moment sometimes, just at sundown, when the quality of light changes. It does not fall upon the world from without, it radiates from within. Things seem self-luminous. Yet, for all their brightness, we see them less clearly, one's vision is dazzled, enmeshed. It is the time when that wondrous old word "faerie" finds its meaning. It is a magic moment. It laid its spell upon us.

Jonathan emerged first, bracing himself. "It will shut down soon. We haven't a minute to spare. We ought to be on the creek now."

It was hard to believe that such brightness could ever shut down. But it did. By the time we reached the creek the gold had vanished, except for a narrow line in the western sky. The world lay in clear, brown twilight, and the wind swept over it.

Jonathan got more hay, and this time I saw the haystack from which he plucked it. I threw myself on it, collar up, cap down, lying as low as possible.

"Bad night for ducks, of course," growled Jonathan. "If only the thaw had held twelve hours more! However--"

He swung off to some chosen spot of his own.

I lay there and the wind surged over me. There was nothing to stop it, nothing to make it noisy. It sang a little around the flap of my coat, it swished a little in the short marsh grass, but chiefly it rushed by above me, in invisible, soundless might. It seemed as if it must come between me and the stars, but it did not, and I watched them appear, at first one by one, then in companies and cohorts, until the sky was powdered with them. Now and then a dark line of ducks streamed over me, high up, in direct, steady flight, but the sound of their wings was swallowed up by the wind. I did not even try to shoot; I was trying to find myself in an elemental world that seemed bigger and more powerful than I had ever conceived it.

Gradually I realized that I was cold. The wind seemed suddenly to have become aware of me. It roared down upon me, it shook me, worried me, let me go, and pounced upon me again in the sport of power. I said to myself, "I cannot resist, I will give myself up to it absolutely," I stopped feeling cold. I was no more than a ship's timber lying on the shore--with just a centre, a point of consciousness somewhere inside, to be aware of the difference between the elements and the something I knew was myself.

But at last I moved. It was fatal. A wave of cold started, pricking somewhere in my head, and undulated sinuously through me, down to my feet. More waves followed; they careered through me. I considered them with interest. Then they settled into aches at all the extremities. All at once it ceased to be interesting, and became a personal grievance--against the wind? the ducks? No-- Jonathan! Of course it was Jonathan's fault. Why didn't he come? I gazed into the twilight where he had disappeared. I couldn't go and hunt for him, because I should certainly get lost or fall into a ditch. Ah! What was that? The long red flash of a gun!--another!--then the double report! Well, of course, if he were shooting, I would suspend judgment a reasonable time.

But it seemed quite an unreasonable time before I felt the impact of his tread on the springy marsh floor. I rose stiffly, feeling cross.

"Did you think I was never coming?"

"I can't think. My brains are stiff."

"I was delayed. I dropped one in the ditch. He was only wounded. I couldn't leave him."

"Then you got some?"

"Feel!"

I felt his game pockets. "One, two--oh, three! I didn't hear you shoot except twice. Well"--I was stamping and flinging my arms around myself in the endeavor to thaw out--"I think they're very well off: they're bound for a warm oven."

"Cold? Thunder! I ought to have left you the bottle. Here!"

I took it and gulped, protesting: "Detestable stuff! Wait, I'll take some more."

"This from you! You _must_ be cold! Come on! Run! Look out for the little ditches! Jump where I do."

We started stiffly enough, in the teeth of the big, dark wind, till the motion, and the bottle, began to take effect. A haymow loomed. We flung ourselves, panting, against it, and, sinking back into its yielding bulk, drew long breaths.

"Did we think it was cold?" I murmured; "or windy?"

We were on the leeward side of it, and it gave generous shelter. The wind sighed gently over the top of the mow, breathed past its sides, never touching us, and we gazed up at the stars.

"The sky is fairly gray with them," I said.

"Perhaps," said Jonathan lazily, "it's that bottle, making you see ten stars grow where one grew before."

"Perhaps," I suggested, choosing to ignore this speech, "it's the wind, blowing the stars around and raising star-dust."

We lay in our protecting mow, and the warmth of our bodies drew out of it faint odors of salt hay. We did not talk. There are times when one seems to exist in poise, with eternity on all sides. One's thoughts do not move, they float.

"Well?" said Jonathan at last.

I could hear the hay rustle as he straightened up.

"Don't interrupt," I answered.

But my spirit had come down to earth, and after the first jolt I realized that, as usual, Jonathan was right.

We plunged out again into the buffeting wind and the starlit darkness, and I followed blindly as Jonathan led across the marshes, around pools, over ditches, until we began to see the friendly twinkle of house lights on the edge of the village. On through the lanes to the highroad, stumbling now and then on its stiffened ruts and ridges. As houses thickened the gale grew noisy, singing in telephone wires, whistling around barn corners, slamming blinds and doors, and rushing in the tree-tops.

"O for that haymow!" I gasped.

"The open fire will be better." Jonathan flung back comfort across the wind.

Ten minutes later we had made harbor in the little house by the shore. The candles were lighted, the fire set ablaze, and as we sat before it cooking chops and toast I said, "No, Jonathan, the open fire isn't any better than the haymow."

"But different?" he suggested.

"Yes, quite different."

"And good in its own poor way."

He turned his chop. Chops and toast and a blazing fire give forth odors of distracting pleasantness under such circumstances.

"I think," I said, "that each gives point to the other."

"Aren't you glad I took you for ducks?" he asked.

I mused, watching my toast. "I suppose," I said, "no one in his senses would leave a comfortable city house to go and lie out in a marsh at night, in a forty-mile gale, with the mercury at ten, unless he had some other motive than the thing itself--ducks, or conspiracy, or something. And yet it is the thing itself that is the real reward."

"Isn't that true of almost everything?" said Jonathan.

XVI

Comfortable Books

Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark into "The Virginians," and, closing the fat green volume, began to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the bricked sides of the fireplace.

"'The Virginians' is a very comfortable sort of book," he remarked.

"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why."

He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, because it's so good and long. You get to know all the people, you get used to their ways, and when they turn up again, after a lot of chapters, you don't have to find out who they are--you just feel comfortably acquainted."

I sighed. I had just finished a magazine story--condensed, vivid, crushing a whole life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In that space I had been made acquainted with sixteen different characters, seven principal ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly drawn. I had found it interesting, stimulating; as a _tour de force_ it was noteworthy even among the crowd of short-stories--all condensed, all vivid, all interesting--that had appeared that month. But--comfortable? No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had been reading "The Virginians" all winter. His bookmark was at page 597, and there were 803 pages in all, so he had a great deal of comfort left.

Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one should expect from one's reading. Certainly it is the last thing one gets from the perusal of our current literature, and any one who reads nothing else is missing something which, whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his soul's sake to have--something which Jonathan roughly indicated when he called it "comfort." The ordinary reader devours short-stories by the dozen, by the score--short short-stories, long short-stories, even short-stories laboriously expanded to a volume, but still short-stories. He glances, less frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at columns of jokes, at popularized bits of history and science, at bits of anecdotal biography, and nowhere in all this medley does he come in contact with what is large and leisurely. Current literature is like a garden I once saw. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity, I invited my soul.

It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five days,"--nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my friends,--my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.

Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand to be had for the seeking. Jonathan finds refuge from business and the newspapers in his pipe and "The Virginians." I have no pipe, but I sit under the curling rings of Jonathan's, and I, too, have my comfortable books, my literary rye-fields. Last summer it was Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," whose book I found indeed a comfortable one--most comfortable. I read much besides, many short stories of surpassing cleverness and some of real excellence, but as I look back upon my summer's literary experience, all else gives place to the long pageant of Malory's story, gorgeous or tender or gay, seen like a fair vision against the dim background of an old New England apple orchard. Surely, though the literature of our library tables may sometimes weary me, it shall never enslave me.

But they must be read, these "comfortable" books, in the proper fashion, not hastily, nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get on" in them. They must lie at our hand to be taken up in moments of leisure, the slowly shifting bookmark--there should always be a bookmark--recording our half-reluctant progress. (I remember with what dismay I found myself arrived at the fourth and last volume of Malory,) Thus read, thus slowly woven among the intricacies and distractions of our life, these precious books will link its quiet moments together and lend to it a certain quality of largeness, of deliberation, of continuity.

For it is surely a mistake to assume, as people so often do, that in a life full of distractions one should read only such things as can be finished at a single sitting and that a short one. It is a great misfortune to read only books that "must be returned within five days." For my part, I should like to see in our public libraries, to offset the shelves of such books, other shelves, labeled "Books that may and should be kept out six months." I would have there Thackeray and George Eliot and Wordsworth and Spenser, Malory and Homer and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Montaigne--oh, they should be shelves to rejoice the soul of the harassed reader!

No, if one can read but little, let him by all means read something big. I know a woman occupied with the demands of a peculiarly exigent social position. Finding her one day reading "The Tempest," I remarked on her enterprise. "Not a bit!" she protested, "I am not reading it to be enterprising, I am reading it to get rested. I find Shakespeare so peaceful, compared with the magazines." I have another friend who is taking entire charge of her children, besides doing a good deal of her own housework and gardening. I discovered her one day sitting under a tree, reading Matthew Arnold's poems, while the children played near by, I ventured to comment on what seemed to me the incongruity of her choice of a book. "But don't you see," she replied, quickly. "That is just why! I am so busy from minute to minute doing lots of little practical, temporary things, that I simply have to keep in touch with something different--something large and quiet. If I didn't, I should die!"

I suppose in the old days, in a less "literary" age, all such busy folk found this necessary rest and refreshment in a single book--the Bible. Doubtless many still do so, but not so many; and this, quite irrespective of religious considerations, seems to me a great pity. The literary quality of the Scriptures has, to be sure, been partly vitiated by the lamentable habit of reading them in isolated "texts," instead of as magnificent wholes; yet, even so, I feel sure that this constant intercourse with the Book did for our predecessors in far larger measure what some of these other books of which I have been speaking do for us--it furnished that contact with greatness which we all crave.

It may be accident, though I hardly think so, that to find such books we must turn to the past. Doubtless others will arise in the future--possibly some are even now being brought to birth, though this I find hard to believe. For ours is the age of the short-story--a wonderful product, perhaps the finest flower of fiction, and one which has not yet achieved all its victories or realized all its possibilities. All the fiction of the future will show the influence of this highly specialized form. In sheer craftsmanship, novel-writing has progressed far; in technique, in dexterous manipulation of their material, the novices of to-day are ahead of the masters of yesterday. This often happens in an art, and it is especially true just now in the art of fiction. Yes, there are great things preparing for us in the future, there are excellent things being done momently about us. But while we wait for the great ones, the excellent ones sometimes create in us a sense of surfeit. We cannot hurry the future, and if meanwhile we crave repose, leisure, quiet, steadiness, the sense of magnitude, we must go to the past. There, and not in the yearly output of our own publishers, we shall find our "comfortable" books.

XVII

In the Firelight

Jonathan had improvidently lighted his pipe before he noticed that the fire needed his attention. This was a mistake, because, at least in Jonathan's case, neither a fire nor a pipe responds heartily to a divided mind. As I watched him absently knocking the charred logs together, I longed to snatch the tongs from his indifferent hands and "change the sorry scheme of things entire." Big wads of smoke rolled nonchalantly out of the corners of the fireplace and filled the low ceiling with bluish mist, yet I held my peace, and I did not snatch the tongs. I know of no circumstances wherein advice is less welcome than when offered by a woman to a man on his knees before the fire. When my friends make fudge or rare-bits, they invite criticism, they court suggestion, but when one of them takes the tongs in his hand, have a care what you say to him! In our household a certain convention of courtesy--fireplace etiquette--has tacitly established itself, in accordance with which the person who wields the tongs, assuming full responsibility for results, is free from criticism or suggestion. Disregard of such etiquette may not have precipitated divorce, but I have known it to produce distinctly strained relations. And so, while Jonathan tinkered in a half-hearted way at the fire, I ruled my tongue. At last, little vanishing blue flickers began to run along the log edges, growing steadier and yellower until they settled into something like a blaze.

Jonathan straightened up, but there was a trace of the apologetic in his tone as he said, "That'll do, won't it?"

"Why, yes," I replied cautiously, "it's a fire."

"Well, what's the matter with it?" he asked tolerantly.

"Since you press me, I should say that it lacks--style."