Clover and Blue Grass

by Eliza Calvert Hall

The fragrant air was like the touch of a warm hand. Fleets of white clouds sailed on the sea of pale blue ether, and the trees, not yet in full leaf, cast delicate shadows on the grass. On a day like this in ancient Rome, young and old clad themselves in garments of joy and went forth to the festival of the goddess of grain and harvests; and under such skies, English poets were wont to sing of skylarks and of golden daffodils. But in the calendar of the Kentucky housewife there is no Floralia or Thesmophoria, and no smile or breath of song was on the lips of the girl who was climbing the back stairs of an old farmhouse, with a bucket of water in one hand and a cake of soap in the other, to celebrate the Christian festival of spring cleaning. The steps were steep and narrow, and every time she set her foot down they creaked dismally, as if to warn the climber that they might fall at any minute. She toiled painfully up and set the bucket on the floor. Where should she begin her work? She went into the nearest bedroom, opened the door of a closet, and looked disgustedly at the disorder within,—coats, hats, trousers, disabled suspenders, a pair of shoes caked with mud, an old whip-handle, an empty blacking box, a fishing-pole and tangled line, a hammer, and a box of rusty nails. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She had cleaned the boys' closet and the boys' room every spring for—how many years? It made her tired to think of it, and she sat down on the edge of the slovenly bed and stared hopelessly around the low-ceiled, dingy room. The mouldy wall paper was peeling off, the woodwork was an ugly brown, dirty, discolored, and worn off in spots; the furniture was rickety, the bedclothes coarse and soiled; and walls, floors, and furniture reeked with a musty odor as of old age, decay, and death. All houses that have sheltered many generations acquire this atmosphere; nothing but fire can wholly destroy such uncleanness, and some vague idea of the impossibility of making the old house wholesomely clean crossed the girl's mind as she sat listlessly on the side of the bed and stared out of the window.

There are two kinds of homesickness. One is a longing for home that seizes the wanderer and draws him across continent and ocean back to the country and the house of his nativity. Men have died of this homesickness on many a foreign soil. The other kind is a sickness of home that draws us away from ordered rooms, from sheltering walls and roofs, to the bare, primitive forest life that was ours ages ago. It was this homesickness that made Miranda sigh and frown as she looked at that room, gray and dingy with the accumulated dirt of the winter, and thought of the task before her. While she sat, scowling and rebellious, a breeze blew in, scattering the sickly odors of the bedroom, and at the same moment she heard two sounds that seem to belong specially to the spring of the year, the bleating of some young lambs in a near meadow and the plaintive lowing of a calf that had been separated from its mother. Yes, spring was here. How she had longed for it all through the long, cold, dark days of winter! And now she must spend its sunny hours in house cleaning! A weariness of all familiar things was upon her; she hated the old house; she wanted to go,—somewhere, anywhere, and her soul, like a caged bird, was beating its wings against the bars of circumstance. She went to the window and leaned out. A branch of a maple tree growing near the house almost touched her cheek, and she noticed the lovely shape and color of the young leaves. Farther on was a giant oak whose orange-green tassels swung gaily in the breeze, and through the trees she had a glimpse of a green meadow bordered by an osage orange hedge that looked like a pale green mist in the morning sunshine. She saw and felt the glory and sweetness of the spring with her physical senses only, for in her heart there was a "winter of discontent." But while she leaned from the window, looking at the trees and sky, came one of those unexplained flashes of consciousness in which the present is obliterated and we are snatched back to a shadowy past. What was the incantation that made her feel that she had lived this same moment ages and ages ago? Was it the voice of the wind and the voice of the bird in the tree-tops? Was it the shimmer of morning mist and the gold-green oak tassels against the blue sky? Or was it a blending of all these sights and sounds? Her gaze wandered farther and farther on till it reached the horizon line where stretched a fragment of the primitive wood, bounded by smooth turnpikes and fenced-in fields and meadows. Serene and majestic these forest remnants stand in every Kentucky landscape, guardians of the Great Silence, homes for the hunted bird and beast, and sanctuaries where the stricken soul of man may find a miracle of healing. A wild, unreasonable longing possessed the homesick girl as she looked at that line of trees, softly green and faintly veiled, and thought of what lay in their secret deeps. All her life had been spent in the country, and yet how many years it had been since she had seen the woods in spring. The woods in spring! The words were like a strain of music, and as she whispered them to herself, something rent the veil between childhood and womanhood, and she saw herself a little girl roaming through the forest, clinging to her father's hand and searching for spring's wild flowers. She saw the blue violets nestling at the foot of mossy stumps, columbines and ferns waving in damp, rocky places, purple hepaticas, yellow celandine, the pinkish lavender bells of the cowslip, Solomon's seal lifting its tiers of leaves by lichened rocks around a dripping spring, and that strange white flower, more like the corpse of a flower than the flower itself, that she had found once—and then no more—growing by a fallen log and half buried under the drift of fallen leaves. Suddenly she started up, hurried from the room, and ran swift-footed down-stairs and into the kitchen, where her mother stood at a table washing the breakfast dishes.

"Mother," she said breathlessly, "I'm going over to the woods awhile. I want to see if the violets are in bloom yet. I'll be back after awhile."

Ellen Crawford paused in her work and looked helplessly at her daughter. The mind of her child had always been a sealed book to her, and she was never without a feeling of apprehension as to what Miranda would do next. "For mercy's sake!" she said weakly. Going to the woods to look for violets in house-cleaning time, when each day's unfinished work overflowed into the brimming hours of the next day! There were no words to fit such folly, and the mother only stood stupefied, looking through the open door at the flying footsteps of her errant daughter.

Miranda ran through the back yard where the house dog lay basking in the sun, and two broods of young chickens were "peeping" around in the wet grass, led by their clucking mothers. The cat came purring and tried to rub herself against Miranda's garments, but she thrust her aside and hurried on. These creatures belonged to the house, and it was the house from which she was fleeing. As she passed through the sagging garden gate, a casual gust of wind stirred the boughs of a water-maple tree near by, and scattered a shower of petals over her hair and shoulders, while a robin in the topmost branch sang a Godspeed to the pilgrim who was hastening to the altars of spring. Down the garden path she sped with never a glance aside at the trim rows of early vegetables bordered by clumps of iris and peonies, with now and then an old-fashioned rose that looked as if it were tired of growing and blooming in the same spot so many years. If one had stopped her and said: "Where are you going?" she could not have told him where. If he had asked: "What do you seek?" again she would have been at a loss for a reply. But she had heard a call more imperative than the voice of father or mother, more authoritative than the voice of conscience; something had passed out of her life with the passing of childhood and first youth; she was going to find the precious lost joy; and the power that guides the bird in its autumnal flight to the south and brings it north again was guiding her feet to the woods in spring.

She pushed aside some loose palings and crept through the opening into the pasture that lay back of the garden. The cows stopped feeding and stared at her in mild surprise as she stood, irresolute and wavering, looking back at the house, where her mother was lifting the burden of the day's toil, and then at the orchard on one side, where the peach trees were faintly flushed with pink. In the middle of the pasture stood a group of elms. When the wind passed over them, their branches swayed with the grace of willows, and against the blue sky their half-grown leaves were delicate as the fronds of the maidenhair fern. The elms seemed to beckon her, and she crossed over and stood for a moment looking up at the sky "in a net",—the net of leafy branches. While she gazed upward, a sudden wind came blowing from the direction of the forest, and on its breath was the mysterious sweetness that is one of the surest tokens of spring. It is as if every tree and plant of the forest had sent forth a premonition of its blooming, a spirit perfume waiting to be embodied in a flower. Miranda drew a long breath and looked across the meadow to the freshly plowed field whose western boundary line was "all awave with trees", each clad in its own particular tint of verdure, from the silver green of the silver poplar to the black green of the cedars. The dogwood, that white maiden of the forest, was still in hiding; the wild cherry, that soon would stand like a bride in her wedding veil, was now just a shy girl in a dress of virginal green; the purplish pink of the red-bud flower was barely visible on its spreading limbs. The Great Artist had merely outlined and touched here and there with his brush the picture which later on he would fill in with the gorgeous coloring of summer's full leafage and full flowering.

She hurried across the meadow, climbed the old rail fence, and plodded her way over the plowed ground, stepping from ridge to ridge and feeling the earth crumble under her feet at every step. It was a ten-acre field, and she was out of breath by the time she reached the other side. There was no fence between field and forest; the only boundary line was the last furrow made by the plow. On one side of this furrow lay civilization with its ordered life of cares and duties. On the other side was the wild, free life of Nature. She stopped and looked doubtfully into the sunlit aisles of the forest, as we look at old familiar places, revisited after long absence, to see if they measure up to the stately beauty with which our childish imagination clothed them. She stepped timidly through the underbrush at the edge of the wood and looked above and around. So many years had passed, and so many things had passed with the years! Perhaps the remembered enchantment had passed too. She recalled the song of the birds, and how the voice of the wind in the tree-tops had sounded against the fathomless stillness that lies at the heart of the forest. She held her breath and listened. Wind and leaf and bird were making music together as of old; and under the whisper and the song she felt the presence of the eternal, inviolable calm against which earth's clamor vainly beats. She recalled the rustle of the dead leaves under her feet, and the odor that the heat of the sun drew from the moist earth. There were dead leaves to-day in every path, and Nature was distilling the same perfumes and making beauty from ashes by the same wondrous alchemy she had used when the earth was young. Nothing had changed except herself. She looked around for an opening in the underbrush, some trace of a path, and then hastened fearlessly on to find the main path that led through the heart of the woods, and made a "short cut" for the traveler on foot. Besides this central path, there were numerous little by-paths made by the feet of cattle that had pastured here for a few months of the previous summer. Each one of these invited her feet, and each one led past some fairy spot—a bed of flowers, a bower of wild vines, a grapevine swing, a tiny spring from which she drank, using a big, mossy acorn cup for a goblet. She wandered from one side of the main path to the other, and thrice she walked from road to road. All winter she had been snow-bound and ice-bound within the walls of the old farmhouse, and now spring had unlocked the doors of the prison. Lighter grew her footsteps the longer she walked, and in every muscle she felt the joy of motion that the fawn feels when it leaps through the forest, or the bird when it cleaves the sunny air on glistening wing.

Gone was the thought of time, for here were no tasks to be done, no breakfast, dinner, and supper; and the day had but three periods,—sunrise, noontide, and sunset. The house she had left that morning seemed a long way off, almost in another world; and the forest was an enchanted land where there was no ugly toil for one's daily bread. Duty and fear alike were lulled to sleep, and while the sun climbed to its zenith she roamed as care-free as any wild creature of the woods. Suddenly a cloud darkened the sun and melted into a soft, warm mist that the wind caught up and blew like a veil across the face of spring. Miranda paused, lifted her head, and held out her hands to catch the gracious baptism. It was only a momentary shower, past in a burst of sunshine, but it left its chrism on her forehead and hair and made her feel more akin to flower and tree. How many gifts were falling from the hand of spring! To the birds the joy of mating and nesting; to the roots and seeds in the dark, cold earth warmth and moisture and a resurrection morn; and to the ancients of the forest a vesture as fresh as that which clothes the sapling of the spring.

Surely we have severed some tie that once bound us to the Great Mother's heart or this outflow and inflow of life and beauty that we call spring would touch men and women too, and then would come the Golden Age. Nature is kinder to her trees and flowers than she is to her sons and daughters. The girl who lifted her forehead to the sacrament of the rain should have received a blessing that would touch her face with the color of the rose and put the strength and grace of the young trees into her limbs. But how sad and strange she looked, flitting through the vernal freshness of the forest! Her faded calico gown hung limp over her thin body, and her hair and cheek were as faded as the gown. She should have been a nymph, but she was only a tired, worn daughter of the soil, and amid all this opulence of giving there was no gift for her except the ecstatic yearning that was welling up in her heart and leading her here and there in search of something she could not name.

How sweet the air was! She breathed deeply as she walked, and at every inspiration a burden seemed to fall from both body and soul. Just to be alive was good—to breathe, to walk through the sun-flecked forest paths, to feel the warmth of the sunshine on her shoulders, and to know that the world of the forest belonged to her as it belonged to the bird and the bee. She had almost reached the other side of the strip of woodland, and through the trees she caught glimpses of a wheat field stretching like a pale green sea from this strip of woodland to another that belonged to a neighboring farm. She thought of a hymn her mother often sang when the drudgery of the farm permitted her soul to rise on the wings of song: