Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

THE LAST DANCE

It was a night in early June. The Home Stretch was all a-glitter, its porches and the great trees on the lawn lighted with rows of colored lanterns.

My Aunt and Eloise had returned; the Cumberland races, the social event of the year, began the next day, and in accordance with her custom my Aunt was giving her annual ball. This time it was to serve a two-fold purpose; for it was also in honor of Eloise and Colonel Goff and was to be the formal announcement of their coming marriage.

I rode over early. If I was needed I wanted to help as of old; and I had seen neither of them since they had returned a week ago, for I had been away for several weeks, in an adjoining county, earning my first fee in forestry. I had been employed by a corporation to pass upon a large tract of timber, to report its millage and availability, but best of all I was to put my plans into effect in its harvesting, cutting out only the ripe trees, and preserving the young ones beneath from death and mutilation.

I had spent two weeks among them. There were many different kinds, and they had become almost like children to me, and like children, they each had different temperaments—these trees—different forms, dispositions, dreams, and they always talked to me, through their little leaves, but sweetest of all in the night, even as children do, when, full of themselves and of life, they gossip so friendly in the balm of the June moon. They told me like village gossipers, of their every little affair, their little vexes, turmoils, the very little scandals of their wood. And in more stirring moods when the night winds would arise and sweep through them the writers, minstrels and poets, stirred to historic flights, quivered with their greater dreams, sang their tales of tree tragedies, of wars had, of fights for life and of martyr and hero deaths.

And I had lain and listened, and felt my heart grow big with throbbing even as when I first read of the wanderings of Ulysses.

I came from out among them older, braver, better. I came with higher motives for my own life and eyes which saw clearer into the future and read more kindly the lives of others.

And gladly would I have stayed in the wood among them, to go back—rather than to see what I must see—Eloise betrothed to another. No tree tragedy could be more cruel than that which had killed the love of my own life.

In withholdingness and sorrow I left them: "duty" not as someone has said, "is the sublimest word in the English language" because duty is often done in pleasure, but the real sublimity of duty is the duty done in pain. To fail to go were cowardice, and I was no coward even if my grandsire did think so.

But when I went into the great hall of The Home Stretch, filled with chattering guests, the contrast was poignant. It was as if deep in the sleeping and silent forces a cloud of chattering birds had landed suddenly among my trees.