As the little girl grew older she could not go to the farm so often, partly because she took a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her mother needed her at home; but always, when she did go, she and her grandmother had the same old good times together, and Margie was still happier there on the old mountain farm than anywhere else in the world. She seemed to love her grandmother better now that she was old enough to think about her more. The grandmother had some funny ways. For one thing she would never sit in a straight chair at table, but always in a rocker. She would eat a little, and then sit back and rock a little, and sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and chatty, she would fall asleep while she rocked, but she would never admit that she had napped a minute, not she. Try as you might, you could never get the grandmother a present that she would keep. She loved dainty things, but the prettier the gift, the more she would fall to thinking how much it would please some one else, and so presently away it went. If the giver chanced to find her out, she would hang her head and look much ashamed of herself, but all the time her eyes would be roguish. All the family teased her and she teased them. She would have walked miles for the sake of a good joke on any one of them, but her fun was always tender. One dearly loved joke she played every year. In October, when the mountains were wonderful in the blue autumn weather and the tang of burning leaves was in the air, a little family of Margie’s cousins used to come out from their town house to the old farm for chestnuts. For days before they came the grandmother and Minnie would gather every chestnut and put away the treasure in a big bag. On the morning of the children’s coming, the grandmother was always to be found scattering the hoarded chestnuts in great handfuls everywhere. Later in the day, when the children were shouting over the windfall, she would shake a threatening finger at the grandfather and Minnie if they dared to chuckle.
After a while the little girl was quite grown up and had gone to college, where she had acquired a bad habit of studying herself sick. Once again her mother in desperation sent her to her grandmother. At the station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting with a cot bed; they laid the little girl on it and walked alongside up the mountain. That morning the grandmother and Minnie had been over all that mile of mountain road and had picked off every stone, so that the little girl might feel no jarring. Margie thought that the back of her head would never stop aching, but her grandmother nursed her and fed her and rubbed her, and wrapped her up warm and put her out in the sunshine; she told her that she must forget what the doctors had said, and that the mountain air would cure her, and so after a while it did.
But there came a last visit. They found that for two years the grandmother had been ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it a secret as long as she could. They sent her little girl to her for the last time. The grandmother would always stop moaning when Margie came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself enough to sit up and tell her stories. She liked to lie in the hammock and have Margie swing her gently, and she would often send her down to the ferny spring for a fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost always as she handed this back to Margie she would say, “Have you ever tasted such good water as this?” and always she was pleased when Margie answered, “No.”
One day Margie had to go away to her teaching. Her grandmother got up from her couch and walked to the front door to bid her good-bye. They said very little, and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked back from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and the valley and the circling mountains, at all the place she loved best in all the world, she knew that she should never wish to see it again.
So the little girl’s visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the first time, one may read a book over again. The little girl has been grown up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and worried and frightened she turns back the pages of her memory. She is sitting on her grandmother’s lap on the porch in the summer twilight. Her grandmother is singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the clematis.
XVII
The Wayfaring Woman
JUST when, for the first time, I was fearing lest some day the wizard-light might fade from my hilltops, because I had climbed them so often; lest some day people’s eyelids might cease to be doors flashing upon mystery, because I had seen so many secrets; and lest, sadder still, I might wake up some morning and find that my comrade-soul had forgotten to pipe me on to the new adventure of the new morning,—just when I was fearing these things, I bought a pair of rubber boots!
They are real boots, real as all masculine things are real. They have straps, a new thing to me in footgear. They are deep and cavernous, so that I sink to the knee, and in them I am armored like a man, but yet a woman. Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my new-bought rubber boots, of adjustment to a man’s free-hearted adventuring. If I am to tramp alone, let me be valiantly shod like a man, though a woman at heart, for is not all the world mine for the walking it? Who knows what new fun may be abroad for me now, in my rubber boots? I was made for life’s out-of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all weathers, and indeed I have walked it in many, plucking by my homely hillpaths thoughts that are wayside flowers along a subtler way.
I have gazed at my circling hills in many changing lights. I have seen them on a moon-flooded summer evening lie shoulder to shoulder asleep about the broad valley pastures, while the tree-shadows wavered black against white farmhouses, asleep, too; and nothing made any noise except the brook beneath my wayside bridge, and that, a merry brown human brook by day, went singing in the moon an elfin chant it had forgotten that it knew. I have seen my hills deepest blue at the skyline, and below all ablaze, beneath the racing white clouds of October, when more than at any other time the winding roads bewitch my feet, and every blackberry thicket and slope and fence-row is flaunting its banners in my eyes; yet I cannot stop to gaze, for the air is of so keen a blueness; I must walk, run, fly, because of the urgency of October in my toes.
But in the spring one’s step slackens, and one stops to loiter and look at the green willows that twist with the wavering course of the swift muddy river; at the rosy mist on the maple-boughs, at sunny blue wings that flash against bare branches. In the spring the most insistent walker must pause by an arbutus bank. Last year’s leaves upon it are still rimmed with frost and snow, and one’s fingers grow red, poking beneath for treasure. But what largess of arbutus our humblest wayside banks hereabouts can yield, arbutus great-petaled, deep-pink, setting free what prisoned fragrance!