The Kentucky Warbler

by James Lane Allen

It was his mother's voice, indulgent, peaceful, sweet. He suddenly thought that never before had he fully realised how sweet it was, had always been, notwithstanding he disappointed her.

He got up and went across to open his shutters and had taken hold of the catch, when he was arrested in his movement. At night he tilted the shutters, so that the morning sun might not enter crevices and shine in his face and awaken him. Now looking down through the slats, he discovered something going on in the yard beneath his window. Elinor had come tipping around the corner of the cottage. She held one dark little witch-like finger unconsciously pressed against her tense lips. Her dark eyes were brimming with a secret, mischievous purpose. A ribbon which looked like a huge, crumpled purple morning-glory was knotted into the peak of her ravenish hair. Her fresh little gown, too, suggested the colours of the purple morning-glory and her whole presence, with a freshness as of dew-drops formed amid moonbeams at midnight, somehow symbolised that flower which surprises us at dawn as having matured its unfolding in the dark: half sinister, half innocent.

With cautious, delicate steps, which could not possibly have made any noise in the grass, she approached the window and stopped and lifted the notched pole which was used to hold up the clothes-line in the back yard. Setting the pole on end and planting herself beside it, she pushed it with all her slight but concentrated strength against the window shutters. It struck violently and fell over to the grass in one direction as Elinor, with the silence of a light wind, fled in the other.

Webster stood looking down at it all: he understood now: that was the crashing sound which had awakened him.

It had been Elinor who had ended his dream.

But his dream was not ended. It would never end. It was in him to stay and it was doing its work. The feeling which had surprised him as to the sweetness of his mother's voice but marked the deeper awakening that had taken place in his sleep, an unfolding, his natural growth. It was this growth that now animated him as he smiled at Elinor's flying figure. Her prank had not irritated him: no intrigue of hers would ever annoy him again. Instead, the idea struck him that Elinor must be thinking of him a great deal, if so much of her life—incessantly active as it was with the other children of the cottages—were devoted to plans to worry him. She must often have him in mind quite to herself, he reflected; and this fresh picture of Elinor's secret brooding about him somehow for the first time touched him tenderly and finely.

He turned back from the window shutters without opening them and sat on the edge of his bed. He could not shake off his dream. How could it possibly be true that there was no such forest as he had wandered into in his dream—that Kentucky wilderness of the old heroic days? Could anything destroy in him the certainty that with wildly beating heart he had seen the living colours and heard the actual notes and watched the characteristic movements of the warbler? Then, though these things were not real, still they were true and would remain true always.

Thus, often and to many of us, between closing the curtains of the eyes upon the outer world at night and drawing them wide in the morning, within that closed theatre a stage has been erected and we have stepped forth and spoken some solitary part or played a rôle in a drama that leaves us changed for the rest of our days. Yesterday an old self, today a new self. We have been shifted completely away from our last foot-prints and our steps move off in another direction, taking a truer course.

Beyond all else a high, solemn sense subdued Webster with the thought, that in his sleep he had come near as to unearthly things. The long-dead hunter, who had appeared to him, spoke as though he lived elsewhere than on the earth and lived more nobly; his accents, the majesty of his countenance, were moulded as by higher wisdom and goodness. Webster was overwhelmed with the feeling that he had been brought near the mystery of life and death and as from an immortal spirit had received his consecration to the forest.