The clinging snow has enfolded all things. Every tree stands with white, shrouded branches. The berry thickets are softly furred with white. The dusky gray aisles of the roadside woods die to blackness in the near distance. The little brooks go tinkling beneath a thatch of snow bristling with high grass blades. There is almost no color. Even the bronze of oak leaves is veiled by white mist. The world is all white and gray, and in the distance faintly blue. The fast-falling snow blurs all familiar outlines strangely, so that I hardly believe those dreamy roofs down there belong to humdrum Littleville.
There is strange, muffled silence. I am half afraid of the woods; they have grown unearthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of the snow that drops from the branches. Gray-white, silent mystery,—and I should never have known or seen it, had I not laughed at life’s wild weather, and trudged forth to it in rubber boots, all alone.
Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside groves, of busy secret streams and homely fields, always the human aspect of the road engages the woman who tramps with joy at the heart. In summer and winter, as I go, I pass the brown milk-wagons, plodding, monotonous, starting forth from all the circling farms and converging to the milk station. The drivers have always dull or far-away faces, for it is always the same road, the same rattling cans at their backs, the same shaggy, jogging flanks before them.
Almost always, somewhere on my journey, I meet the rural mail-man. The bobbing yellow dome of his narrow wagon is always easily descried in the distance. The mailman knows my tramp-habits well, and the smile from his little blinking pane never fails me. Another familiar vehicle is the school carryall, which nowadays picks up all the human contents of one of our district schools and carries them down to Littleville for instruction. The school wagon is driven by a jovial grandsire, and it is always crowded to overflowing with small, merry people who hail me. I rarely meet any folk on foot, although occasionally a leggined huntsman slips noiselessly across the road from one grove to another, while a hound sniffs to right and left of his path.
The farm-homes for the walker by the way have each the spell of some new story. There beside that wind-rocked cupola is some curious mechanism. For what purpose? To lift water to a roof-tank? To catch the lightning? To send afloat an airship? Crude, clumsy, aspirant, a farm-boy’s dream!
I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road. A door flings open and a man and a woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed me. The woman’s face is set in impotent hate, the man’s mouth is wried with cursing; and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness a mere passing blight. Man and wife! Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went driving gayly back from the parson’s, his arm about her ribboned waist, and posies flaunting in her hat and in her cheeks—once!
It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond the doors to pity often, but to envy rarely. It is in the nature of things that we cannot envy, for those things we might covet are precisely those that come spilling out of door and window to bless us, so that presently we are bowing our heads and saying our bit of a grace for them, as being also ours. Gentle old world, so constituted that a home can lock its door, if it will, upon its sorrow, but can never hide its joy! I pass another ragged farmhouse, and here the children in their homemade little duds are trooping in from school. Again an open doorway, and in it a mother wiping red hands upon her apron. The closing door shuts off sharply the shrill voices that tell of the day’s events; but I have seen and heard, and therefore I, too, possess.
At still another window-pane there is a bobbing baby-face. Such a crowing, chuckling joy as is a year-old baby! What home could ever hide him under a bushel? Strange mystery, that gives, withholds, inscrutably, the heart’s desire of all of us, and yet ordains for us who trudge a snow-cold path, that there shall be, even until we grow gray of soul and feeble-footed, forever along our way, until the end, always behind the panes we pass, the bobbing baby-faces! Other women’s babies? Does it make so much difference whose they are, so long as they are sweet?
Another happiness it is ordained no woman shall keep unto herself. The peace of a woman’s mouth when a good man loves her, that is another of the things nothing can conceal, for sorrow may be leaden and secret at the heart, but joy will always out and abroad. That is one of the things we know, we wayfaring women.
Walks end with the dipping of the day. The winter dusk steals very early over all the snowy whiteness. I have to peer to see Littleville’s clustered roofs down there in the river-valley. Before I turn to wade back down the drifted hill-road to the ruddy little home that lends me harborage for the night, I stand still to look about me, through the whirling flakes. See all around me hills I have not yet climbed! Think of the untried roads that lead to them! What secret wizardry of new woods, what elfin tinkle of new brooks, what new farmdoors, glimpsing upon human mystery! Hills and the road for me, on and on! Just around the turn what wonders wait, shall ever wait, for my rubber boots and me!