CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Some Phenomena Peculiar to Spring
He awoke early, refreshed and intensely alive. With the work done he became conscious of a feeling of disassociation from the surroundings in which he had so long been at home. Many words of the talkative German were running in his mind from the night before. He was glad the business was off his mind. He would now go the pleasant journey, and think on the way.
His trunks were ready for the car; and before he went down-stairs his hand-bag was packed, and the preparations for the start completed. When, after his breakfast, he read the telegram announcing that the car had been delayed twenty-four hours in Chicago, he was bored by the thought that he must pass another day in New York. He was eager now to be off, and the time would hang heavily.
He tried to recall some forgotten detail of the business that might serve to occupy him. But the finishing had been thorough.
He ran over in his mind the friends with whom he could spend the time agreeably. He could recall no one he cared to see. He had no longer an interest in the town or its people.
He went aimlessly out on to Broadway in the full flood of a spring morning, breathing the fresh air hungrily. It turned his thought to places out of the grime and clamour of the city; to woods and fields where he might rest and feel the stimulus of his new plans. He felt aloof and sufficient unto himself.
He swung on to an open car bound north, and watched without interest the early quick-moving workers thronging south on the street, and crowding the cars that passed him. At Forty-second Street, he changed to a Boulevard car that took him to the Fort Lee Ferry at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.
Out on the shining blue river he expanded his lungs to the clean, sweet air. Excursion boats, fluttering gay streamers, worked sturdily up the stream. Little yachts, in fresh-laundered suits of canvas, darted across their bows or slanted in their wakes, looking like white butterflies. The vivid blue of the sky was flecked with bits of broken fleece, scurrying like the yachts below. Across the river was a high-towering bank of green inviting him over its summit to the languorous freshness beyond.
He walked off the boat on the farther side and climbed a series of steep wooden stairways, past a tiny cataract that foamed its way down to the river. When he reached the top he walked through a stretch of woods and turned off to the right, down a cool shaded road that wound away to the north through the fresh greens of oak and chestnut.
He was entranced at once by the royal abandon of spring, this wondrous time of secret beginnings made visible. The old earth was become as a young wife from the arms of an ardent spouse, blushing into new life and beauty for the very joy of love. He breathed the dewy freshness, and presently he whistled the "Spring Song" of Mendelssohn, that bubbling, half-joyous, half-plaintive little prayer in melody.
He was well into the spirit of the time and place. His soul sang. The rested muscles of his body and mind craved the resistance of obstacles. He rejoiced. He had been wise to leave the city for the fresh, unspoiled country—the city with all its mean little fears, its petty immoralities, and its very trifling great concerns. He did not analyse, more than to remember, once, that the not reticent German would approve his mood. He had sought the soothing quiet with the unfailing instinct of the wounded animal.
The mysterious green life in the woods at either side allured him with its furtive pulsing. But he kept to the road and passed on. He was not yet far enough from the town.
Some words from a little song ran in his mind as he walked:
"The naked boughs into green leaves slipped,
The longing buds into flowers tripped,
The little hills smiled as if they were glad,
The little rills ran as if they were mad.
"There was green on the earth and blue in the sky,
The chrysalis changed to a butterfly,
And our lovers, the honey-bees, all a-hum,
To hunt for our hearts began to come."
When he came to a village with an electric car clanging through it, he skirted its borders, and struck off through a woodland toward the river. Even the village was too human, too modern, for his early-pagan mood.
In the woods he felt that curious thrill of stealth, that impulse to cautious concealment, which survives in man from the remote days when enemies beset his forest ways. On a southern hillside he found a dogwood-tree with its blossomed firmament of white stars. In low, moist places the violets had sprung through the thatch of leaves and were singing their purple beauties all unheard. Birds were nesting, and squirrels chattered and scolded.
Under these more obvious signs and sounds went the steady undertone of life in root and branch and unfurling leaf—provoking, inciting, making lawless whomsoever it thrilled.
He came out of the wood on to another road that ran not far from the river, and set off again to the north along the beaten track.
In an old-fashioned garden in front of a small house a girl bent over a flower bed, working with a trowel.
He stopped and looked at her over the palings. She was freshly pretty, with yellow hair blown about her face under the pushed back sunbonnet of blue. The look in her blue eyes was the look of one who had heard echoes; who had awakened with the spring to new life and longings, mysterious and unwelcome, but compelling.
She stood up when he spoke; her sleeves were turned prettily back upon her fair round arms.
"Yes, the road turns to the left, a bit ahead."
She was blushing.
"You are planting flower seeds."
"Yes; so many flowers were killed by the cold last winter."
"I see; there must a lot of them have died here, but their souls didn't go far, did they now?"
She went to digging again in the black moist earth. He lingered. The girl worked on, and her blush deepened. He felt a lawless impulse to vault the palings, and carry her off to be a flower for ever in some wooded glade near by. He dismissed it as impracticable. His intentions would probably be misconstrued.
"I hope your garden will thrive. It has a pretty pattern to follow."
"Thank you!"
He raised his hat and passed on, thinking; thinking of all the old dead flowers, and their pretty souls that had gone to bloom in the heaven of the maid's face.
Before the road turned to the left he found a path leading over to the top of the palisade. There on a little rocky shelf, hundreds of feet above the river, he lay a long time in the spring sun, looking over to the farther shore, where the city crept to the south, and lost its sharp lines in the smoky distance. There he smoked and gave himself up to the moment. He was glad to be out of that rush. He could see matters more clearly now—appraise values more justly. He was glad of everything that had come. Above all, glad to go back and carry on that big work of his father's—his father who had done so much to redeem the wilderness—and incidentally he would redeem his own manhood.
It will be recalled that the young man frequently expressed himself with regrettable inelegance; that he habitually availed himself, indeed, of a most infelicitous species of metaphor. It must not be supposed that this spring day in the spring places had reformed his manner of delivery. When he chose to word his emotions it was still done in a manner to make the right-spoken grieve. Thus, going back toward the road, after reviewing his great plans for the future, he spoke aloud: "I believe it's going to be a good game."
When he became hungry he thought with relief that he would not be compelled to seek one of those "hurry-up" lunch places with its clamour and crowd. What was the use of all that noise and crowding and piggish hurry? A remark of the German's recurred to him:
"It is a happy man who has divined the leisure of eternity, so he feels it, like what you say, 'in his bones.'"
When he came out on the road again he thought regretfully of the pretty girl and her flower bed. He would have liked to go back and suggest that she sing to the seeds as she put them to sleep in their earth cradle, to make their awakening more beautiful.
But he turned down the road that led away from the girl, and when he came to a "wheelman's rest," he ate many sandwiches and drank much milk.
The face of the maid that served him had been no heaven for the souls of dead flowers. Still she was a girl; and no girl could be wholly without importance on such a day. So he thought the things he would have said to her if matters had been different.
When he had eaten, he loafed off again down the road. Through the long afternoon he walked and lazed, turning into strange lanes and by-roads, resting on grassy banks, and looking far up. He followed Doctor von Herzlich's directions, and, going off into space, reduced the earth, watching its little continents and oceans roll toward him, and viewing the antics of its queer inhabitants in fancy as he had often in fact viewed a populous little ant-hill, with its busy, serious citizens. Then he would venture still farther—away out into timeless space, beyond even the starry refuse of creation, and insolently regard the universe as a tiny cloud of dust.
When the shadows stretched in the dusky languor of the spring evening, he began to take his bearings for the return. He heard the hum and clang of an electric car off through a chestnut grove.
The sound disturbed him, bringing premonitions of the city's unrest. He determined to stay out for the night. It was restful—his car would not arrive until late the next afternoon—there was no reason why he should not. He found a little wayside hotel whose weather-beaten sign was ancient enough to promise "entertainment for man and beast."
"Just what I want," he declared. "I'm both of them—man and beast."
Together they ate tirelessly of young chickens broiled, and a green salad, and a wonderful pie, with a bottle of claret that had stood back of the dingy little bar so long that it had attained, at least as to its label, a very fair antiquity.
This time the girl was pretty again, and, he at once discovered, not indisposed to light conversation. Yet she was a shallow creature, with little mind for the subtler things of life and the springtime. He decided she was much better to look at than to talk to. With a just appreciation of her own charms she appeared to pose perpetually before an imaginary mirror, regaling him and herself with new postures, tossing her brown head, curving her supple waist, exploiting her thousand coquetries. He was pained to note, moreover, that she was more than conscious of the red-cheeked youth who came in from the carriage shed, whistling.
When the man and the beast had been appeased they sat out under a blossomed apple-tree and smoked together in a fine spirit of amity.
He was not amazed when, in the gloom, he saw the red-cheeked youth with both arms about the girl—nor was he shocked at detecting instantly that her struggles were meant to be futile against her assailant's might. The birds were mating, life was forward, and Nature loves to be democratically lavish with her choicest secrets. Why not, then, the blooming, full curved kitchen-maid and the red-cheeked boy-of-all-work?
He smoked and saw the night fall. The dulled bronze jangle of cow-bells came soothingly to him. An owl called a little way off. Swallows flashed by in long graceful flights. A bat circled near, indecisively, as if with a message it hesitated to give. Once he heard the flute-like warble of a skylark.
He was under the clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of the house. That disturbed him to fierce longings—the clear, high measure of a woman's laugh floating to him in the night. And once she sang—some song common to her class. It moved him as her laugh did, making him vibrate to her, as when a practised hand flutters the strings of a harp. He was glad without knowing why when she stopped.
At ten o'clock he went in from under the peering little stars and fell asleep in an ancient four-poster. He dreamed that he had the world, a foot-ball, clasped to his breast, and was running down the field for a gain of a hundred yards. Then, suddenly, in place of the world, it was Avice Milbrey in his grasp, struggling frantically to be free; and instead of behaving like a gentleman he flung both arms around her and kissed her despite her struggles; kissed her time after time, until she ceased to strive against him, and lay panting and helpless in his arms.