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."