When we were alone again, the road explained, questioning with searching friend-eyes to see if I understood, “Many selves belong to every road that must be always climbing a hill, all alone. Don’t you know,” laughed the little road, “that there was never a dryad but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over her flickering leaf-films and slip into some crofter’s cot in Tempe and slap the wheat-cakes on the warm hearth-stones?
“And I have other moods as I climb,” whispered the little road, as we took hands and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and playing with them, with no one to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out loud in the friendly solitude of little roads like this.
Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too. Maples like great torches of flame studded the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields marched the corn-shocks, a ragged brown battalion. The sky was ever burning bluer above the hill-crest. Then we left the farm fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pasture, and suddenly the little road said: “Look, a wayside shrine! Let us stop.”
Pine trees such as survive now in only a few scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel. Beneath the trees some one had built a rude stone pile, a picnic fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little wildwood road all things are natural. We stood silent on that pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the arching green, supported on its blue-brown pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far tops there went singing an eternal chant. No one ever listened long to that music, all alone, who did not know that it is a hymn older than any creed, and outliving all doubt. In the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted by eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart of all desire, so that, troubled, I asked, “But it was to pray that we stopped?”
“Oh,” answered the pagan road, “I never pray, for what is the use of learning how to lisp?—I only praise!”
We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but we were deeper friends when we went on, for there is no bond in friendship closer than the sharing of a faith. Our feet were springing along as up we went. There were no more farms now, only at last above us the hilltop and the sky, clouds that raced across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and the call of high-winging crows.
The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to say to me this intimacy, “Do you not know my gospel,—that gladness is God? That is why I am always climbing hills. That is why I called you this morning, so that for a little while I and you might step into the sky.”
XIX
My Mother’s Gardeners
OF gardens “so much has been said and on the whole so well said,” that I might perhaps restrain my pen from turning up that overworked soil. But yet the gardens of which I write have not been like the gardens of the published page. They have not brought forth generously either prose of lusty vegetable or poetry of spicy blossom. Although the gardens have been many, they might almost be described, so alike have they been, as if they were one, an itinerant garden that has accompanied us from one little hill village to another; for I write of the stony, arid, sterile garden-plot of a country parish.
Now, however forbidding the garden that has stretched rearward of each new domicile, my mother has always fallen upon it with a valiance of hope that neither years nor disappointment can destroy. She always thinks that things are going to grow in her gardens, and things do grow in them, too; but they are not always the things my mother has led me to expect. For her, I hope she will find the garden of her dreams in Paradise; for me, this earth will do, even this small, hill-circled scrap of it; for I am no gardener in my heart, only an observer of gardens. I own to an unregenerate enjoyment in watching my mother’s vegetables misbehave, just as, surreptitiously, I can’t help loving the whimsical goats of my father’s rustic flock.