I have tramped my climbing roads in winter-time, too, on those days of winter when the mercury sinks to the zero point, when the snow crunches loud beneath my heels, and the sun hangs high and cold, and the spangle glistens on crusted fields. But heretofore there have been days of winter when I have felt myself held within doors, days of slush and ooze, when the sky broods low, and the air is blind with great wet flakes; yet these were the very days when the gypsy wind came rattling the window-sash and piping of new wonders of grayness and of whiteness out there upon the hills.
I who have packed my wanderer’s wallet with the gentle secrets of summer nights, of springtime hillsides, and wintry sunshine, I who have always tramped to the call of a lonely road, should I turn craven stay-at-home when life’s wild weather draws my feet hillward through grim slush and sleet? Are there not new secrets waiting on the stormy hills? I am not afraid! I have put on rubber boots.
In all this countryside I am the only woman who walks. Highroads and by-paths and woodways are mine alone, for here solitude is safe and cheery for the woman who goes uncompanioned. I pass by unmolested, but not unhailed. Happily, I have reached the age when men greet me with level comrade eyes, and pass me merrily the time of day; at least the genial old codgers of our region do. The men of my home hamlet of Littleville are a bit proud of my pedestrian prowess, and if they meet me wandering far will draw rein to twinkle down and rally me: “Guess you’re lost this time sure, ain’t you?”
The strangers I meet rarely pass me in churlish silence. I have had a man, never before seen, bend down from his high seat, his face all one pucker of concern, while he shouted to me in a high windy voice, “Hi, there, you’re losing a hat-pin!” His over-spread relief as I adjusted it was but one instance of the intimacy ruling within the sweeping circle of hills that rim Littleville like a cup. We are no strangers here, we comrades of the road.
Yet in my walking I must often pay the penalty of being unique, of being an anomaly in country conventions. They are kind, our rural men-folk, but I think the kindest, passing me, make a swift comparison between me and their kitchen-keeping women. In this inarticulate comparison there is a boyish flash of sympathy that I should find the out-of-doors the same jolly thing men do; but more, there is distrust of one who obviously enjoys the zest of her own feet as much as their wives enjoy jogging through life beside a comfortable husband behind a comfortable horse. Possibly the thoughts of rural men-folk are not so different from the thoughts of all other men-folk when they pass the woman who walks.
Whatever the mental comment attached to the gaze, the eyes that meet mine are quite as often astounded as amused. If this is evident even when I trudge in flooding sunshine, astonishment becomes irrepressible when I am seen abroad in snow and sleet. “By gosh! pretty hard walking you got, ain’t you?”
Foot-fast in slush, I pipe back, “But I like it. I have on rubber boots!”
Such the accost from vehicles not facing in my direction; but when a horse that goes my way is drawn up, and I decline the proffered seat; knee-deep in slush, refuse to get in! then the driver’s face expresses such commiseration as I never expected to feel applied to my inoffensive person. Plainly I see that it is not my drabbled skirts he is sorry for, it is my addled wits. Walking country roads in ill weather has taught me exactly how a lunatic must feel. It is said that the crazy have a certain look in the eye; of experience I can affirm that so also have those who gaze upon the crazy.
For the passing instant, as I meet that profound pity in mild, masculine orbs, I do doubt my own sanity, and wonder if perhaps this glorious freedom of the wild, wet weather is quite the sensible thing it seemed when I set out; for it is the look in other people’s eyes that gives us our own spiritual orientation. Lunacy is a purely relative term. There are places where women may walk and hardly be glanced at for so doing, just as, perhaps, within his own cage-walls, the Bedlamite may seem to himself a normal human being. Also, perhaps, the lunatics, like me, have their silent chuckle; knowing, like me, that they have their inward fun, although the numskull sane can’t see it. I hope so, for I would fain think some sunny thought of the poor brainsick folk.
It is not given to my friends of the highway, sensible men creatures on wheels, any more than to their wives, snug at home in dry domestic shoes, to know the joy of my walk through the swift, wet snowflakes. On and up I go, never meaning to go home by the same way I have come. What lover of the road ever does that?