The boys did not seem to want culture in the little ranches. Some of the women could hardly speak English. Their replies were given in an accent so exotic that the sense did not penetrate to Edward’s faulty hearing. When he looked at their faces, however, he was generally glad he could not understand. He was not wise in his choice of “clean fields.”
Bungalows infest the slopes of the Russian River, yet almost every bungalow at which Edward knocked was apparently uninhabited, except at week-ends. There was no business there—still, there was the Russian River. A rigorous red road sawed up the dark high mountains on the south bank of the river. There were trees everywhere. Young redwoods against the sky were strangely bare and lancelike. The sun made nothing of the inconsiderable branches of the trees—it made clear only their proud back-bones. There were madrones. One would expect to bend a madrone like rubber; its stem has the apparent texture of red rubber. And bent it is, but only by great winds. Its stem and branches are red and rose-red or gold and green-gold; it glows like a pillar of jewels and precious metals. Once a year madrone opens hundreds of little windows in its scarlet and crimson tower, little green square windows are cut in the bark, through which joy in the heart of the madrone looks out at spring. At those times it is as if there was, pouring from the innumerable windows, a most gay green and gold light into the forest—light where sunlight cannot enter—a low, gay light in the forest shadows. But now madrone’s windows were closed, madrone was sealed up in its smooth shadeless red towers. The glazed grape-colored stems of manzanita haunted the shadows below the madrones. There were columbines with their flowers strangely balanced in the air like stage fairies. And most of the world in sight was pricked by pines and firs in all shades of green, ranging from a hot, live green to a green that had almost the sheen of a Blue Persian cat.
The Russian River, far down, ran among mauvish tapering islands of sand. It crouched low down beneath the feet of the hills and the trees. The sun-dazzle upon the river dodged behind the shoulders of the hills.
Edward tried to “work” the self-conscious summer villages and the concealed and suspicious mountain hamlets. Milton for Our Boys seemed to be a drug in the forest market. Talk of uplift withered in the smell of the sea that came up the Russian River.
Edward slept one night simply and uncomfortably beside the prostrate bicycle under a twisted madrone tree, on soil thick with intimate small weeds—soil that for the first two hours was soft and seemed a vantage point from which to sing to the stars, but for the rest of the night was hard and infested with ants. Stars are stark comfort at three in the morning.
All next day he was in sunlight on the naked low hills that follow the line of the sea. The hills were burnt; it seemed that they had even caught something of the colour of flame. They were burnt tawny gold and crimson. These were the naked hills; they were done with the draperies of spring.
Edward bicycled briskly. He felt rather ashamed of having to move his feet in such a brisk prancing way; he thought that he shewed the ridiculous jauntiness of a toy dog.
He was approaching The World’s Egg Center. The hills broke out into an eruption of white hens. Edward thought that, just as every provincial mother looks to London, so it must be every hen’s ambition to have an egg making its début at the World’s Egg Center. Twelve miles out of the egg metropolis suburbs of hens were already thick on the ground.
Apart from hens, the only flowers of that bare country seemed to be boulders, great proud purple boulders rooted in their own clear shadows. Sometimes little wind-bent trees, like jockeys, rode the boulders.
Edward called upon many chicken ranchers in the hope of introducing Milton to their boys. He was becoming desperate. He had thirty-five cents left in the world. Chickens must be an absorbing pursuit; no rancher had any time or attention for Milton.