August 13th.
Sunday Night.
Scientists tell us that a change that is slow but complete takes place in the human body every seven years. They are wrong about the process. It happens in the twinkling of an eye—like that change in the far-off judgment day of which the Bible tells. I know. This very day it happened to me. This Sabbath morning I waked a healthy, happy, normal spinster behind whom lay, except for this anxiety Dicky gives, almost thirty barren-of-emotion years.
Breakfast was not ready when I came down, so I rushed up the lane. If we lived more pretentiously it would be the drive. Beyond lay the white road that leads up to Marsville and trails round the mountain and out to a wider life.
The hills that neighbour with the blue ether were shaking night-caps of trailing mist from their heads. The mountain world breathed deep of August—proclaimed it exultantly in its vivid summer green as yet untouched by change; in its full-eared, ripening corn, massed on the hills like troops of soldiers. The insect shrills were August noises as were the lazy little chirps of the birds that have forgotten their joyous outpourings of spring. I loved it all—even the crow circling majestically about the distant hills so far away that his raucous cry came musically—and all of it contented me. Quite forgetting my approaching thirtieth birthday I threw a kiss to that mountain on the skyline that is so like a camel with a humpy back. There’s always been a secret understanding between that mountain and me, I suppose it is left over from my young girlhood, I was only eighteen the first time I saw Camel Back, that some day he would dump all his treasures into my lap—treasures from all the lands of the East. Yesterday I got another editor’s check—Camel Back has always held me steady under my rejections, hence the salute. Down through the ages how the world would have laughed if the Egyptians had made their Sphinx a man—wise Egyptians. As I threw the kiss to my mountain the shadow of no man was on my heart, or had ever been, but I felt the thrill of life’s infinite mystery and promise—felt it and called it an editor’s check. At thirty a spinster woman may begin to run to fat, or she may show tendencies to shrivel, but I boldly declare, my knowledge dating back some dozen hours, that her heart is unwrinkled, ridiculously young, and scanning the horizon for Eastern treasures that the camels that hang in the skyline are to pour into her lap.
Back home, breakfast over, as John left the table he tossed a letter to me. It was Dicky’s letter for which I have waited a whole week. It is in answer to the dozen I have sent out to her—like wireless messages of distress.
In the yard, out beyond the shadow of the big white pines, drying my hair—the women of Marsville have no beauty parlour in which to ruin it with dry air—lying full length in the sun, my head pillowed on a cushion, pondering Dicky’s letter, reading it over and over, I was jarred out of my reverie by a poke in the ribs and the mountaineer’s, “Howdy.” I failed to respond, was poked in the ribs a second time, sprang up indignantly and glared into the dirty, smiling landscape that is the face of old Sallie Singleton. “I thought I knowed that old back,” her harsh voice said amiably. Old back, indeed. Unmindful of my lack of cordiality the floodgates opened and harsh verbal oceans submerged me. I tried to shut it out, but I could not. “Mis Golightly hadn’t let the fire go out on her hearth for nigh forty year, but she went over the mountain to visit her daughter that had her first baby. In hearing of the train she took homesick and hiked it back. Savannah Lou was old-like, as I knowed, and, as I knowed, her beau died. He was full of debts as a dog is full of fleas, and the Lord knowed what he was doing when He took him. She had a picter left stid o’ a man, and she was a sight happier with the picter then she’d a ben with the man. When he was courtin’ they’d set and set, and talk and talk. He never took her nowhere—not even as far as her nose. She set store by the picter. She’d had a picter man put whiskers on it. She’d allus knowed whiskers’d become him, but he was stubborn and wouldn’t grow ’em. She——”
But I had fled, running for my life—or was it to save the life of old Sallie that I ran? In the twinkling of an eye the mysterious change had come. Sallie had poked in the back, the old back that she knowed, a contented spinster teacher. A horse whisked about in the shafts and made to go in a direction contrary to the one he was travelling might understand the bewilderment of the woman who fled from Sallie Singleton. I did not. We are strange creatures, blown upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell forever in a little fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is our daily life and we are frightened if we but glimpse beyond the cleared land. I had looked over the fence, and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic I hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge their sober path through all the days allotted to them; in sudden terror age with its hideous potentialities of loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie grown gray and dirtier but always with the Puck-like knowledge of the psychologic moment at which to torture me with the neighbourhood gossip. Age and John, dear, good John on one side of the fireplace winter nights roaring at me the advancement of his rheumatism and I on the other side roaring back the increasing feebleness of my digestion.
All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held me by the throat. All day I have stumbled along in a maze of distorted thought—swept from all moorings of common sense. Now I have come into the night, the big, silent, star-filled night to ask peace of it. Here under the giant pines that stand like sentinels to guard the peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still and warm and sweet—a white, white August night, for the coming moon lights the sky. Above all nights I have loved these August nights—the clematis dropping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a bride’s veil, and there in the border, running parallel with the low, long, rambling, gray, gray old house the white phlox in masses neighbouring with the August lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in pain. In their faint, sweet breathings they say to me, “We live but for a day. Take warning. Youth flees, dies as we die.”
John comes to the hall door and peers out into the dimness of the shadowy pines. “Honey,” he calls, “are you out there? Good-night. I’m turning in.” I call back, “Good-night.”
Big and red the moon that is only a little past full pushes over the hill. The desire to taste the night, to drown my tumult in its peace seizes me. Out on the hilltop, alone face to face with the night, and unafraid, I am indeed swept from my moorings. There to the east, where the skyline is so sharply irregular, just where Camel Back marches eternally on the horizon, he makes me think of a city I have never seen. I want to use his back as a stepping stone to the moon and look down on a play I have just been reading about. When the curtain lifts I want to see those real camels marching past, their background a sunrise in the desert.