THE AFTERNOON
I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at the end of the forenoon chapter. Echo Lake, at the foot of it, is one of the places where I love best to linger, and to-day it was more attractive even than usual; the air of the clearest, the sun bright, the mountain woods all in young leaf, the water shining. But the black flies, which had left me undisturbed on the railroad, though I sat still by the half-hour, once I reached the lake would allow me no rest.
It was twelve days since my first visit. The snow was gone, and the trailing arbutus had dropped its last blossoms; but both kinds of shadbush, standing in the hollow where a snowbank had lain ten days ago, were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady’s-slippers were common (more buds than blossoms as yet), and the pink rhodora also; with goldthread, star-flower, dwarf cornel, housonia, and the painted trillium. Chokeberry bushes were topped with handsome clusters of round, purplish buds.
The brightest and prettiest thing here, however, was not a flower, but a bird; a Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before me in the low bushes—an extraordinary act of grace on the part of this haunter of treetops—as if on purpose to show himself. He was worth showing. His throat was like a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of notice, was singing among the evergreens near by. So I believed, but the flies were so hot after me that I made no attempt to assure myself. I was fairly chased away from the waterside. One place after another I fled to, seeking one where the breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza of the little shop—now unoccupied—at which the summer tourist buys birch-bark souvenirs, with ginger-beer, perhaps, and other potables. There I finished my luncheon, still having a skirmish with the enemy’s scouts now and then, but thankful to be out of the thick of the battle. The rippling lake shone before me, a few swifts were shooting to and fro above it, but for the time my enjoyment of all such things was gone. That half hour of black-fly persecution had dissipated the happy mood in which the forenoon had been passed, and there was no recovering it by force of will. A military man would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my morale. Something had happened to me, call it what you will. But if one string was broken, my bow had another. Quiet meditation being impossible, I was all the readier to go in search of Selkirk’s violet, the possible finding of which was one of the motives that had brought me into the mountains thus early. To look for flowers is not a question of mood, but of patience. To look at them, so as to feel their beauty and meaning, is another business, not to be conducted successfully while poisonous insects are fretting one’s temper to madness.
If I went about this botanical errand doubtingly, let the reader hold me excused. He has heard of a needle in a haystack. The case of my violets was similar. The one man who had seen them was now dead. Years before, he had pointed out to me casually (or like a dunce I had heard him casually) the place where he was accustomed to leave the road in going after them—which was always long before my arrival. This place I believed that I remembered within perhaps half a mile. My only resource, therefore, was to plunge into the forest, practically endless on its further side, and as well as I could, in an hour or so, look the land over for that distance. Success would be a piece of almost incredible luck, no doubt; but what then? I was here, the hour was to spare, and the woods were worth a visit, violets or no violets. So I plunged in, and, following the general course of the road, swept the ground right and left with my eye, turning this way and that as boulders and tangles impeded my steps, or as the sight of something like violet leaves attracted me.
Well, for good or ill, it is a short story. There were plenty of violets, but all of the common white sort, and when I emerged into the road again my hands were empty. “Small,” “rare,” says the Manual. My failure was not ignominious,—or I would keep it to myself,—and I count upon trying again another season. And one thing I had found: my peace of mind. Subjectively, as we say, my hunt had prospered. Now I could climb Bald Mountain with good hope of an hour or two of serene enjoyment at the summit.
The climb is short, though the upper half of it is steep enough to merit the name, and the “mountain” (it will pardon me the quotation marks) is no more than a point of rocks, an outlying spur of Lafayette. Its attractiveness is due not to its altitude, but to the exceptional felicity of its situation; commanding the lake and the Notch, and the broad Franconia Valley, together with a splendid panorama of broken country and mountain forest; and over all, close at hand, the solemn, bare peak of Lafayette.
I took my time for the ascent (blessed be all-day jaunts, say I), minding the mossy boulders, the fern-beds, and the trees (many of them old friends of mine—it is more than twenty years since I began going up and down here), and especially the violets. It was surprising, not to say amusing, now that I had violets in my eye, how ubiquitous the little blanda had suddenly become. Almost it might be said that there was nothing else in the whole forest. So true it is that seeing or not seeing is mostly a matter of prepossession. As for the birds, this was their hour of after-dinner silence. I recall only a golden-crowned kinglet zeeing among the low evergreens about the cone. He was the first one of my whole vacation trip, and slipped at once into the eighty-seventh place in my catalogue, the place I had tried so hard to induce the brown creeper to take possession of two hours before. Creeper or kinglet, it was all one to me, though the kinglet is the handsomer of the two, and much the less prosaic in his dietary methods. In fact, now that the subject suggests itself, the two birds present a really striking contrast: one so preternaturally quick and so continually in motion, the other so comparatively lethargic. Every one to his trade. Let the creeper stick to his bark. Quick or slow, he should still have been Number 88, and thrice welcome, if he would have given me half an excuse for counting him. As things were, he kept out of my reckoning to the end.
“This is the best thing I have had yet.” So I said to myself as I turned to look about me at the summit. It was only half past two, the day was gloriously fair, the breeze not too strong, yet ample for creature comforts,—coolness and freedom,—and the place all my own. If I had missed Selkirk’s violet, I had found his solitude. The joists of the little open summer-house were scrawled thickly with names and initials, but the scribblers and carvers had gone with last year’s birds. I might sing or shout, and there would be none to hear me. But I did neither. I was glad to be still and look.
There lay Echo Lake, shimmering in the sun. Beyond was the hotel, its windows still boarded for winter, and on either side of it rose the mountain walls. The White Cross still kept something of its shape on Lafayette, the only snow left in sight, though almost the whole peak had been white ten days before. The cross itself must be fast going. With my glass I could see the water pouring from it in a flood. And how plainly I could follow the trail up the rocky cone of the mountain! Those were good days when I climbed it, lifting myself step by step up that long, steep, boulder-covered slope. I should love to be there now. I wonder what flowers are already in bloom. It must be too early for the diapensia and the Greenland sandwort, I imagine. Yet I am not sure. Mountain flowers are quick to answer when the sun speaks to them. Thousands of years they have been learning to make the most of a brief season. Plants of the same species bloom earlier here than in level Massachusetts. After all, alpine plants, hurried and harried as they are, true children of poverty, have perhaps the best of it. “Blessed are ye poor” may have been spoken to them also. Hardy mountaineers, blossoming in the very face of heaven, with no earthly admirers except the butterflies. I remember the splendors of the Lapland azalea in middle June, with rocks and snow for neighbors. So it will be this year, for Wisdom never faileth. I look and look, till almost I am there on the heights, my feet standing on a carpet of blooming willows and birches, and the world, like another carpet, outspread below.
But there is much else to delight me. Even here, so far below the crest of Lafayette, I am above the world. Yonder is one of my pair of deserted farms. Good hours I have had in them. Beyond is the Chase clearing, and still beyond, over another tract of woods, are the pasture lands along the road to “Mears’s.” Then comes the line of the Bethlehem road, marked by a house at long intervals—and thankful am I for the length of them. There I see my house; one of several that I have picked out for purchase, at one time and another, but have never come to the point of paying for, still less of occupying. When my friends and I have wandered irresponsibly about this country it has pleased us to be like children, and play the old game of make-believe. Some of the farmers would be astonished to know how many times their houses have been sold over their heads, and they never the wiser. Further away, a little to the right, I see the pretty farms—romantic farms, I mean, attractive to outsiders—of which I have so often taken my share of the crop from Mount Agassiz, at the base of which they nestle. To the left of all this are the village of Franconia and the group of Sugar Hill hotels, with the Landaff Valley (how green it is!) below them in the middle distance. Nearer still is the Franconia Valley, with the Tucker Brook alders, and far down toward Littleton bright reaches of Gale River.
All this fills me with exquisite pleasure. But longer than at anything else I look at the mountain forest just below me. So soft and bright this world of treetops all newly green! I have no thoughts about it; there is nothing to say; but the feeling it gives me is like what I imagine of heaven itself. I can only look and be happy.
About me are stunted, faded spruces, with here and there among them a balsam-fir, wonderfully vivid and fresh in the comparison; and after a time I discover that the short upper branches of the spruces have put forth new cones, soft to the touch as yet, and of a delicate, purplish color, the tint varying greatly, whether from difference of age or for other reasons I cannot presume to say. In this low wood, somewhere near by, a blackpoll warbler, not long from South America, I suppose, is lisping softly to himself. A myrtle warbler, less recently come, and from a less distance, has taken possession of a dead treetop, hardly higher than a man’s head, from which he makes an occasional sally after a passing insect. Between whiles he sings. Once I heard a snowbird, as I thought; but it was only the myrtle warbler when I came to look. An oven-bird shoots into the air out of the forest below for a burst of aerial afternoon music. I heard the preluding strain, and, glancing up, caught him at once, the sunlight happening to strike him perfectly. All the morning he has been speaking prose; now he is a poet; a division of the day from which the rest of us might take a lesson. But for his afternoon rôle he needs a name. “Oven-bird” goes somewhat heavily in a lyric:—
“Hark! hark! the oven-bird at heaven’s gate sings”—
you would hardly recognize that for Shakespeare.
As I shift my position, trying one after another of the seats which the rocks offer for my convenience, I notice that the three-toothed five-finger—a mountain lover, if there ever was one—is in bud, and the blueberry in blossom. The myrtle warbler sings by the hour, a soft, dreamy trill, a sound of pure contentment; and two red-eyed vireos, one here, one there, preach with equal persistency. They have taken the same text, I think, and it might have been made for them: “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little and there a little.” Right or wrong, the warbler’s lullaby is more to my taste than the vireos’ exhortation. A magnolia warbler, out of sight among the evergreens, is making an afternoon of it likewise. His song is a mere nothing; hardly to be called a “line;” but if all the people who have nothing extraordinary to say were to hold their peace, what would ears be good for? The race might become deaf, as races of fish have gone blind through living in caverns.
These are exactly such birds as one might have expected to find here. And the same may be said of a Swainson thrush and a pine siskin. A black-billed cuckoo and a Maryland yellow-throat, on the other hand, the yellow-throat especially, seem less in place. What can have brought the latter to this dry, rocky hilltop is more than I can imagine. A big black-and-yellow butterfly (Turnus) goes sailing high overhead, borne on the wind. For so unsteady a steersman he is a bold mariner. A second look at him, and he is out of sight. Common as he is, he is one of my perennial admirations. The peak of Lafayette is no more a miracle. All the flowers up there know him.
Now it is time to go. I have been here an hour and a half, and am determined to have no hurrying on the way homeward, over the old Notch road. Let the day be all alike, a day of leisure and of dreams. A last look about me, a few rods of picking my steep course downward over the rocks at the very top, and I am in the woods. Here, “my distance and horizon gone,” I please myself with looking at bits of the world’s beauty; especially at sprays of young leaves, breaking a twig here and a twig there to carry in my hand; a spray of budded mountain maple or of yellow birch. Texture, color, shape, veining and folding—all is a piece of Nature’s perfect work. No less beautiful—I stop again and again before a bed of them—are the dainty branching beech-ferns. There is no telling how pretty they are on their slender shining stems. And all the way I am taking leave of the road. I may never see it again. “Good-by, old friend,” I say; and the trees and the brook seem to answer me, “Good-by.”