But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched in flickering shadow on the brown pine needles; and I, the picnic place has caught me again into its spell. Nowhere does spring come stepping so delicately as in New England. In other places there is more riot and revelry in the carnival of bursting blossoms and leaf. In New England spring has the face of a girl nun. There are white violets in our woods and white birch stems. The very light has a quality soft and rare. The sky is the Quaker ladies’ own color. Across the swirling water that leaps down the rock path, the face of a hill rises high into the sky. It is all gray boulder and brown, with a film of pale green over all, touched here and there by the dreamy white of the shadbush. Nearer by, great boulders at the waterside below us are moss-covered, and across them the dappled shade of little leaves goes flickering. The beautiful tree shapes are unhidden, gray stems twining with brown. There is a satin sheen in the rod of light that lines each trunk-shaft turned to the sun. Just now, sailing from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray of the hill opposite, there fluttered a white butterfly.
After a long time I touch the envelope packed with poetry, and move it tentatively toward my friend’s hand. She shoves it quietly aside. Drowsy though she is, she has an eye open to watch Peggy’s glossy brown head tossing down there in an amber-lit wood space, and to see that Mac does not wake from his nap, where he lies only half visible against the russet leaves he has chosen to match his coat. Nowadays any soaring talk may be interrupted by a hearty “Whoa, Peggy!” or a “Down, Mac!” It is no poor punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for people whose feet have often ached from treading the tree-tops.
She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to my stories. I am eager to tell her about all the new people in my brain. She brushes the cobwebs from their heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing, in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that I need to write, while I, I know, too, that she need not. If we did not, each of us, understand, could there be any more picnics? But the pauses grow longer, filled with the voices of the water and the wood. The air is warm and drowsy, and at last she is fast asleep, held close to the brown earth, and I, the other one, sit straight, my back to a stout pine, while my thoughts go wandering, gazing in at Eden, at all Edens. Everybody’s path skirts so many Edens, of the women friends married, and the men friends married. Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections. Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine needles, I know, as every woman must know, that she will never again need me in the old way, and, as every woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry. The question for each of us, man or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he, will she, still come out sometimes into life’s great open and picnic with me? That all depends, does it not? on the newcomer. If he, if she, is a petty person, there are no more picnics. If a man, moving in to possess all sky, all sea, every crack and cranny of the universe, still holds most sacred there that path of a woman’s past which she walked, alone, to come to him, he will leave untouched all the little sunny picnic places, for any man big enough to deserve all a woman’s past would be far too big to desire it; is not just that the secret of how to have picnics though married?
And still my thoughts go wandering, passing now from the “wap-eradicator” to all that lies back of it, of our need for it. How fundamentally different the way in which we must both regard that great black pistol lying between us! To her it is a new toy, something she has recently learned to shoot, and deeper, truer, it is the symbol of a husband’s protection, while I see beyond it that great fevered army of the unemployed, those who work and want, whose presence makes a weapon necessary. In some way I cannot analyze, I know that I am vaguely glad that I am on their side of the fence; in both my work and play too far away from them, perhaps, and too forgetful, still on their side of the ramparts of Eden, in that strange great world where no one ever is satisfied.
That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to which no new poem has been added for many a month,—will she ever write again, and shall I be glad or sorry, I who know myself how a woman’s writing is made? Yet hers is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she remembered,—if she could set to music the purring of her kettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,—how the sunny words might twinkle on harder, stranger paths! But if happy people remembered, could they then be happy? Oh, dear me, why must I be always asking questions? The wind is blowing, and against that big frowning boulder a buttercup is bobbing in the sun: how many times a day one is glad one does not have to be God, but only has to know Him there, behind this sun-and-shadow curtain we name Life!
But my friend is awake, measuring the time of the master’s home-going and ours. She is up, and running down to the waterside. I see her there, slender and tall, light-poised on a stone. Beyond her the opposite hillside looms high, green and gray. Above her ruddy head a shadbush bends itself, russet and white like her own woods-dress. As I look she tosses the water from her cup, and it falls in a great arc of sun-spray against the dusk of the woods.
The home-going is as glad as the going forth, but quieter, with long shadows across the grass. We pass pools where tall trees stand with their feet in the water in the gold light of late afternoon, and all the motionless brown water is bordered bright with marsh-marigolds. We stop at a watering-trough, and I must get out to undo Peggy’s check-rein, and to keep a hand on Mac’s collar so that he will not tumble head foremost over the high rail. I hand up a cup to the driver seated, and we drink thirstily, all four of us.
One farm has been happy with a spring paint-brush since our morning passing. Every flower-pot, box, tripod, and that curiously frequent flower-receptacle, the iron boiler, cut in lengthwise section, has been coated with dashing vermilion. Spring had got into their bones on that farm.
Mac lags from time to time, and we have to stop to lug and heave him into the wagon, where he lies across our feet, a panting, restless lap-robe of warm Airedale. Now a curious social phenomenon occurs. The very dogs, which in the morning had nosed Mac in friendliest fashion, come forth and bark and howl at him in his present eminence. It is the old, old story of the proletariat protesting against the plutocrat.
The green spring country is seamed by old stone walls. I do not know why an old stone wall has power to touch my pulses strangely, to set stirring dreams long prisoned. It is some forgotten child association, I suppose, the feeling that an old stone wall gives me, exactly akin, by the way, to that of an old covered bridge, with its magic of mystery-shod hoofs at midnight.