But more than by any other creature the spirit of idleness has been fostered by my four-footed friend, the particular joy of my life here, Dixie. For I must tell you that one’s love of woods is only whetted by looking out, as I am told we do, upon two hundred and fifty thousand acres of virgin forest—the old Seminole hunting-grounds—which swallow up the white man’s puny clearings so effectually that even a Zeiss glass can scarcely pick them out. Dixie and I may travel for hours, through tangles of jessamine-laced live-oak and palmetto, down to dim lakes where the cypresses stand in water to their “knees” (with all the moss curtains close-drawn against the sun), and never see a soul. Then, when even in the open ways of the pine woods we find the warm day quenched in mist, I let the rein fall slack and trust to that skill of Dixie’s, never baffled yet, to take me home the shortest way, in spite of night or storm or the fierce dazzle of tropic lightning.
If we are late, we know “Uncle” Fielding will be looking out for us. Even if I fail to distinguish his kind, dark face, I see the whites of his eyes shining, I hear his rich voice lowered to reproach that I should be abroad so late in the vast Annuttalagga woods that go to the verge of the world.
But Uncle Fielding has his share in my idleness, for he knows the stories I like best of all. When I’ve gone to sit within the radiance of the great open fireplace (less for warmth than for sake of cedar scent and love of the flaring, singing resin in the pine), Uncle Fielding will come staggering in under the weight of a single log, and having thrown it down, will tarry awhile. To my polite hope that he feels at home in his new cottage, he replies with gentle assurance: “I’ll haf to be mighty ole and mighty painful befoh I leave this hilltop.” With humility I learn to see myself as the transient one, the visitor, and Uncle Fielding as the one who rightly is “at home.” Even for neighborly credit and fair regard I look to him. For when one of the younger generation, or some mere new-comer ventures: “They say, in the old days, you knew her brother,” “Knew him?” says Uncle Fielding loftily, “I raised him—” and so re-establishes our respectability in a land that for so many years has known us only as little-remembered names.
Can you not see that with the vivid intervention of all this new-old life—the story you bade me write has in a brief space gone to a distance so illimitable that beside such a standard of remoteness, Florida is neighbor to the Pole? I tell you plainly that if this book of yours is ever to be finished, you must send me something of that influence that has so often spurred me on before. Once even here, a touch of it, like your hand on my shoulder, reached me one evening, in spite of all the hosts of Hernando. Walking about at sunset to count how many mangoes were growing near the house—I was pursued as far as the great ilex at the gates by faint intermittent strains of some unearthly music. I looked up, thinking of those “harps” that Hilda heard and to whose strains she unsealed the Master Builder’s ears. Again that music! faint but unmistakable; sad and wild, with its vaguely inciting call. A little shamefaced for my fancy, I said to one who knew not Hilda: “I could almost swear I heard harps in the air.” “Yes,” was the answer, “on the roof,” as though it were the most natural thing on earth that a carpenter, instead of making us rain-proof, should devise and lash in place a wind-harp over our heads! I thought how you would have disapproved that man—and cherished him.
Although the winds that come sweeping over the Mexican Gulf have cast the great lyre down from my housetop—nevertheless, now that I’ve invoked you, I seem to hear the air again—even feel on my shoulder that touch of your hand with which you sent me forth to try if, in the midst of the London din, we might not make folk pause an instant, and say with upturned faces: “Harps in the air!” You and I have heard them for many a year, my friend. I think I never was with you long, but I caught some note of that far music. Even with the thick of the world between us, I listen for you to call the tune that “sends me on.”
E. R.