Letter III
From the Lady Helen Pole to the Countess of Edge and Ross.
Boulder Lake,
June 23d
Dearest Poll:
NONE of the Club people here yet, and if it were not for newspapers and letters—a man in the employ of the Club climbs this perpendicular mountain every evening with the post—I should cease to believe in a world which lives in my mind as a mere clash of sound. It is so quiet here! Sometimes when I am alone in my room I throw a shawl over the clock to muffle its ticking. It seems a cheap intrusion upon this colossal silence. I have been in the woods for hours at a time when not even a bird has trilled, nothing but that soft soughing of the unsleeping wind in the tree-tops. In the evening an occasional caw-caw comes from the forest, a lonesome cricket shrills, a frog croaks in the reeds.
I often go deep down into the forest and listen to the faint monotonous hum of the leaves, always a soft sound, when one gets away from the rigid spruce, because the leaves of the maple are as delicate in texture as they are in tint. And these leaves, in places, seem to fill the woods. Unless you throw back your head you barely realise the existence of the trees, only that gently moving lace-like curtain of green many-pointed leaves that meets the leafy ground. The sunlight splashes here and there. I have found a gorge whose gloom is eternal; in the friendlier depths the twilight is almost green. You know how I despise all theologies and churches and vulgar public demonstration of what should be man’s most sacred inner life; but when I am alone in the forest I always say my prayers; and that occasional solitary communion with God is surely the only true religion for intelligent beings. I have heard of “revival meetings” in which people “stand up and confess Christ.” Public emotions. How unutterably vulgar and cheaply sensational. And what pleasure can a religion be that is shared with the multitude, that is formulated, ticketed, branded with the approval of others? I hope everybody I know, except the one or two I love, thinks me a pagan. I am jealous of what is more truly my own than anything else can ever be.
But to return to my woods. I have spoken of the sleepless wind, but occasionally it goes elsewhere, and I have sat for hours on one of the boulders which strew these mountains, born of some unimaginable convulsion, modelled by unrecorded glaciers, and waited eagerly for even a bird to give the silence a tiny but startling shake. And yet, as I have written you before, I think, there is none of the peace of England here. But it is magnificent, this feeling of lofty remoteness, of standing just under the sky, of feeling and hearing the silence. There is sweetness and charm rather than grandeur in these woods, but still not peace. Nature is much like human nature. While her youth lasts—and how much man has to do with the quickening of time!—she suggests turbulence in her silences, there is something disquieting, even forbidding, in that very sweetness which is a careless incidental gift. Sometimes when I am alone in the forest, a mile or more from home, not even another “trail” but the one I dare not leave, the ferns and dogwood brushing my waist, that broken green curtain motionless against a colossal boulder, not a sound, not a fleeting suggestion of any world beyond those ancient trees with their young leaves, those immeasurable depths with other mountains and other forests beyond them, all beauty, the very idealisation of one’s dreams of the “forest primeval,” the isolation of mountain-tops made manifest, a fear comes over me which I have no more been able to define than I have yielded to. I know that the bear is infrequent and harmless, the panther is gone for ever, that a poisonous snake has never been seen on the Adirondacks, that tramps are unheard of, and that I cannot lose my way if I keep to the trail. And as you know I am what is called heroic, and have spent hours alone on English moors and in English woods. Never before have I felt the sudden terror that assails me here in this beautiful gentle and unthinkably aged forest, with its eternal virginal youth. Some day the meaning of it will come to me suddenly, like the girl’s face in the moon; you know I manage to get to the core of most things.
Bertie is getting a little bored, and is restless, but is so much better that he is very good-natured about it. He takes a short walk with me in the forest every day, and a row when the sun is full on the lake. I often row him, it is so good to have him all to myself. Agatha has been the best of mothers to us, but after all she is not our mother, and she is almost too old for a sister. We love her, but we love each other far more, more indeed than we ever have loved any one else, but Dad; and sometimes when in his wretched physical weakness Bertie drops his head on my shoulder, and becomes as confidential with me as in his innocent boy days, I see into a soul that has more good in it than bad, and much strength in spite of the sad weakness his broken confessions reveal. I am sure now that if he recovers he will become as useful, if not as great, a man as Dad. Ah, there was a man! He admired Agatha from a distance, but he kept us two so close to him that we ought to be a thousand times better and more sensible than we are. But he has been dead six long years, Bertie has rank and riches, and I am beautiful. What hope that the world would let us alone!
Agatha is so happy at Bertie’s improvement that she does not care—except on his account—whether the lake people come up at all or not, and, besides, she is too good to be bored. I do not mean that sarcastically, for these people who are constantly thinking of others never have time to sit down and commiserate their Ego.
This evening I was down at the edge of the lake watching the sunset—a blue one of many shades, from limpid pale blue lakes to masses of rich ultramarine, instead of the usual splendour of red and gold—when the keeper passed me in a boat. He paused and pointed to the end of the lake.