Read Ebook: The Jonathan Papers by Morris Elisabeth Woodbridge

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Ebook has 702 lines and 42049 words, and 15 pages

me my pretty, silly hens, with all their aimless, silly ways. I will seek intelligence, when I want it, elsewhere.

In another direction, too, Jonathan's optimistic temperament has found little encouragement. This is in regard to the chimney swallows. When we first came, these little creatures were one of my severest trials. They were not a trial to Jonathan. He loved to watch them at dusk, circling and eddying about the great chimney. So, indeed, did I; and if they had but contented themselves with circling and eddying there, I should have had no quarrel with them. I did not even object to their evolutions inside the chimney. At first I took the muffled shudder of wings for distant thunder, and when great masses of soot came tumbling down into the fireplace, I jumped; but I soon grew accustomed to all this. I was even willing to clean the soot out of my neat fireplace daily, while Jonathan comforted me by suggesting that the birds took the place of chimney-sweeps, and that soot was good for rose bushes. Yes, if the little things had been willing to stick to their chimney, I should have been tolerant, if not cordial. But when they invaded my domain, I felt that I had a grievance. And invade it they did. At dawn I was rudely awakened by a rush from the fireplace, a mad scuttering about the dusky room, a desperate exit by the little open window, where the raised shade revealed the pale light of morning. At night, if I went with my candle into a dark room, I was met by a whirling thing, dashing itself against me, against the light, against the walls, in a moth-like ecstasy of self-destruction. In the mornings, as I went about the house pulling up the shades and drawing back the curtains, out from their white folds rushed dark, winged shapes, whirring past my ears, fluttering blindly about the room, sinking exhausted in inaccessible corners. They were as foolish as June bugs, fifty times bigger, and harder to catch. Moreover, when caught, they were not pretty; their eyes were in the top of their heads, like a snake's, their expression was low and cunning. They were almost as bad as bats! Worst of all, the young birds had an untidy habit of tumbling out of the nests down into the fireplaces, whether there was a fire or not. Now, I have no conscientious objection to roasting birds, but I prefer to choose my birds, and to kill them first.

One morning I had gathered and carried out of doors eight foolish, frightened, huddling things, and one dead young one from the sitting-room embers, and I returned to find Jonathan kneeling on the guest-room hearth, one arm thrust far up the chimney. "What are you doing, Jonathan?" The next moment there was the familiar rush of wings, which finally subsided behind the fresh pillows of the bed. Jonathan sprang up. "Wait! I'll get it!" He carefully drew away the pillow, his hand was almost on the poor little quivering wretch, when it made another rush, hurled itself against the mirror, upset a vase full of columbines, and finally sank behind the wood-box. At last it was caught, and Jonathan, going over to the hearth, resumed his former position. "Jonathan! Put him out of doors!" I exclaimed. "Sh-h-h," he responded, "I'm going to teach him to go back the way he came. There he goes! see?" He rose, triumphant, and began to brush the soot out of his collar and hair. I was sorry to dash such enthusiasm, but I felt my resolution hardening within me.

"But you wouldn't have an old house without chimney swallows!" he remonstrated in tones of real pain.

"I would indeed."

It ended in a compromise. At the top of the chimney Jonathan put a netting over half the flues; the others he left open at the top, but set in nettings in the corresponding flues just above each fireplace. And so in half the chimney the swallows still build, but the young ones now drop on the nettings instead of in the embers, and lie there cheeping shrilly until somehow their parents or friends convey them up again where they belong. And I no longer spend my mornings collecting apronfuls of frightened and battered little creatures. At dusk the swallows still eddy and circle about the chimney, but Jonathan has lost the opportunity for training them. Once more the optimist is balked.

But in these matters I am firm: I do not want the hens made intelligent, or the orchard improved, or the swallows trained. There is, I am sure, matter enough in other parts of the farm upon which one may wreak one's optimism. I hold me to my tidy hearths, my comfortable hens, my old lilacs, and my dreaming apple trees.

A Desultory Pilgrimage

Many of our friends seem to be taking automobile trips during the summer months--very rapid trips, since, as they explain, "it strains the machine to go too slowly, you know." Jonathan and I wanted to take a trip too, and we looked about us on the old farm for a conveyance. The closest scrutiny failed to discover an automobile, but there were other vehicles--there was the old sleigh in the back of the woodshed, where the hens loved to steal nests, and the old surrey, shabby but willing, and the business wagon, still shabbier but no less willing; there were the two lumber wagons, one rather more lumbering than the other; and there were also various farming vehicles whose names and uses I have never fathomed, with knives and long raking arrangements, very uncomfortable to step over when hunting in the dark corners of the barns for hens' nests or new kittens.

Moreover, there was Kit, the old bay mare, also shabby but willing. That is, willing "within reason," although it must be admitted that Kit's ideas of what was reasonable were distinctly conservative. The chief practical difference between Kit and an automobile, considered as a motive power, was that it did not strain Kit in the least to go slowly. This we considered an advantage, slow-going being what we particularly wished, and we decided that Kit would do.

For our conveyance we chose the business wagon--a plain box body, with a seat across and room behind for a trunk; but in addition Jonathan put in a shallow box under the seat, nailed to cleats on the bottom of the wagon so that it would not shift and rain would run under it. In this we put the things we needed by the roadside--the camping-kit, drinking-cups, bait-boxes, camera, and so on. Then we stowed our trout rods and baskets, and one morning in June we started.

Our plan was to drive and fish through the day, cook our own noon meal, and put up at night wherever we could be taken in, avoiding cities and villages as far as possible. Beyond that we had no plan. Indeed, this was the best of it all, that we did not have to get anywhere in particular at any particular time. We did not decide on one day where we would go the next; we did not even decide in the morning where we would go in the afternoon. If we found a brook where the trout bit, and there was no inhospitable "poster" warning us away, we said, "Let's stay! who cares whether we get on or not?" And we tied Kit to a tree, took out our rods and baskets, and followed the brook. If noon found us still fishing, we came back to the wagon, fed Kit, got out our camping-outfit, and cooked our fish for luncheon. It did not take long. I collected kindling and firewood while Jonathan was laying a few big stones for a fireplace shaped like a squared letter "C," open towards the wind and big enough to hold our frying-pan. Then we started the fire, and while it was settling into shape Jonathan dressed the fish and cut a long stick to fit into the hollow handle of the frying-pan, and I had time to slice bits of pork and set out the rest of the luncheon--bread and butter, milk if we happened to have passed a dairy farm, a pineapple or oranges if we happened to have met a peddler, strawberries if we had chanced upon one of the sandy spots where the wild ones grow so thickly.

Then the pan was set over, the pork was laid in, and soon the little fish were curling up their tails in the fragrant smoke. If they were big and needed long cooking, I had time to toast bread or biscuit in the embers underneath for an added luxury, and when all was ready we sat down in supreme contentment. And we never forgot to give Kit a lump of sugar, or some clover tops, that she might share in the picnic. But every now and then she would turn and regard us with eyes that expressed many things, but chiefly wonder at the queerness of folks who could prefer not to go back to their own stable to eat. When luncheon was over, the dishes washed in the brook, and the wagon repacked, we ambled on, leaving our little fireplace, with its blackened stones and its heart of gray ashes.

No one who has never tried such an aimless life can realize its charm and its restfulness. Most of us spend our days catching trains, and running to the telephone, and meeting engagements. Even our pleasures are seldom emancipated from these requirements; they are dependent on boats and trolley cars and trains, they are measured out in hours and minutes, and we snatch them running, as the Israelites did their water. But this trip of ours was bounded only by the circle of the week, and conditioned only by the limitations of Kit. No one could telephone to us, even at night, because no one knew where we were to be. As for trains, we never once saw one. Now and then we heard one whistle, so far away that it merely emphasized its own remoteness, and a few times we were compelled to cross over or under a track--a very little track, and single at that; beyond this our connection with the symbol of Hurry did not go.

The limitations of Kit were indeed definite and insurmountable. While her speed on a level was most moderate, uphill it was actually glacial, and going downhill it was little better. For Kit had come from the level West, and being, as we have said, conservative, she could never reach any real understanding of hills. She was willing and conscientious, but prudent, and although she went downhill when she was requested to, she did it very much as an old lady might go down a precipice--she let herself down, half sitting, with occasional gentle groans, rocking from side to side like a boat in a chop sea. Now all New England is practically either uphill or downhill, and, if we had been in any haste, these characteristics of Kit might have annoyed us; but inasmuch as we did not care where we went or when we got there, what difference did it make? In fact, it was rather a relief to be thus firmly bound to sobriety.

In one respect we could not be absolutely irresponsible, however. We found it advisable to seek out our night's lodging while it was yet light enough for the farmer's wife to look us over and see that we were respectable. Our first night out we failed to realize this, and we paid for it by being forced to put up at a commonplace village inn, instead of a farmhouse. After that we managed to begin our search for a hostess about milking-time, and we had little further trouble. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the week was the hospitality we received; and our opinion of the New England farmer, his wife and his children, grew higher as the days passed. Courteous hospitality, or, if hospitality had to be withheld, courteous regret, was the rule. Twice, when one house could not take us in, they telephoned--for the telephone is everywhere now--about the neighborhood among friends until they found a lodging for us. And pleasant lodgings they always proved.

Ostensibly, our drive was a trout-fishing trip, and part of the fun certainly was the fishing. Not that we caught so many. If we had seriously wished to make a score, we might better have stayed at home and fished in our own haunts, where we knew every pool and just how and when to fish it. But it was interesting to explore new brooks, and as we never failed to get enough trout for at least one meal a day, what more could we wish? And such brooks! New England is surely the land of beautiful brooks. They are all lovely--the meadow brooks, gliding silently beneath the deep-tufted grasses, where the trout live in shadow even at noonday, and their speckled flanks are dark like the pools they lie in; the pasture brooks, whose clear water is always golden from the yellow sand and pebbles and leaves it ripples over, and the trout are silvery and pale-spotted; the brooks of the deep woods, where the foam of rapids and the spray of noisy little waterfalls alternate with the stillness of rock-bound, hemlock-shadowed pools. All the brooks we followed, whether with good luck or with bad, I remember with delight. No, all except one. But I do not blame the brook.

It happened in this way: One Monday morning, after an abstemious Sunday, the zeal of Jonathan brought us forth at dawn--in fact, a little before dawn. I had consented, because, although my zeal compared to Jonathan's is as a flapping hen compared to a soaring eagle, yet I reflected that I should enjoy the sunrise and the early bird-songs. We emerged, therefore, in the dusk of young morning, and I had my first reward in a lovely view of meadows half-veiled in silvery mist, where the brook wound, and upland pastures of pale gray-green against ridges of shadowy woods. But I was not prepared for the sensation produced by the actual plunge into those same meadows. I say plunge advisedly. I shiver yet as I recall the icy chill of that dew-drenched grass. It was worse than wading a brook, because there was no reaction. Jonathan, however, did not seem depressed by it, so I followed his eager steps without remark. We reached the brook, we put our rods together, and baited. "Crawl, now," admonished Jonathan; "they're shy fellows in those open pools." We crawled, dropped in, and waited. My teeth were chattering, my lips felt blue, but I would not be beaten by a little wet grass. After a few casts, Jonathan murmured, "That's funny," and moved cautiously on to the next pool. Then he tried swift water, then little rapids. I proceeded in chilly meekness, glad of a chance at a little exercise now and then when we had to climb around rocks or over a stone wall. Occasionally I straightened up and gazed out over the meadows--those clammy meadows--and up toward the high woods, brightening into the deep greens of daylight. The east was all rose and primrose, but I found myself unable to think of the sun as an aesthetic feature; I longed for its good, honest heat. A stove, or a hot soapstone, would have done as well.

And that is my one experience with dawn fishing. But Jonathan, reacting from the experience with the temper of the true enthusiast, still maintains that trout do bite at dawn. Perhaps they do. But for me, no more early-dewy meadows, except to look at.

Those hours of dawn fishing were the hardest work I did during the week. A lazy week, in truth, and an irresponsible one. Every one who can should snatch such a week and see what it does for him. In some ways it was better than camping, because camping, unless you have guides, is undoubtedly hard work, especially if you keep moving--work that one would never grudge, yet hard work nevertheless. The omitting of the night camp cut out practically all the work and made it more comfortable for the horse, while our noon camps made us independent all day, and gave us that sense of being at home outdoors that one never gets if one has to run to cover for every meal.

And, curiously enough, the spots that seem homelike to me, as I linger in memory among the scenes of that week, are not the places where we spent the nights, pleasant though they were, but rather the spots where we built our little fireplaces. Each was for an hour our hearth-fire,--our own,--and I do not forget them,--some beside the open road, one on a ridge where the sun slants across as it goes down among purpling hills; one in the deep woods, by a little trout brook, where the sound of running water never ceases; one in an open grove by the river we love best, where a tiny brook with brown pools full of the shadowy trout empties its cold waters into the big, warm current. Perhaps no one else may notice them, but they are there, waiting for us, if haply we may pass that way again. And if we do, we shall surely pause and give them greeting.

The Yellow Valley

We were on our way to the Yellow Valley. We had been pushing against the wind, through the red March mud of a ploughed field. Mud is a very good thing in its place, and if its place is not a ploughed field in March, I know of no better. But it does not encourage lightness of foot. At an especially big and burly gust of wind I stopped, turned my back for respite, and dropped into the lee of Jonathan. Wind is a good thing, too, in its place, but one does not care to drown in it.

"Jonathan," I gasped, "this isn't spring; it's winter of the most furious description. Let's reform the calendar and put up signs to warn the flowers. But I want my spring! I want it now!"

"Well," said Jonathan, "there it is. Look!" And he pointed across the brush of the near fence line, where a meadow stretched away, brown with the stubble and matted tangle of last year's grass. Halfway up the springy slope, in a little fold of the hillside, was a shimmer of green--vivid, wonderful.

I forgot the wind. "Oh-h! Think of being a cow now and eating that! Eating spring itself!"

"If you were a cow," said Jonathan, with the usual masculine command of applicable information, "they wouldn't let you eat it."

"They wouldn't! Why not? Does it make them sick?"

"No; crazy."

"Crazy!"

"Just that. Crazy for grass. They won't touch hay any more, and there isn't enough grass for them--and there you are!"

"Did you make that up as you went along, Jonathan?"

"Ask any farmer."

But I think I will not ask a farmer. He might say it was not true, and I like to think it is. I am sorry the cows cannot have their grass, but glad they have the good taste to refuse hay. I should, if I were a cow. Not being one, I do not need an actual patch of green nibble to set me crazy. The smell of the earth after a thaw, a breath of soft air, a wave of delicious sweetness, in April, in March, in February,--when it comes in January I harden my heart and try not to notice,--this is enough to spoil me for the dry fodder of winter. Hay may be good and wholesome, but I have had my taste of spring grass, and it is enough. That or nothing. No more hay for me!

What that strange sweetness of the early spring is I have never fully discovered. The fragrance of flowers is in it,--hepaticas, white violets, arbutus,--yet it is none of these. It comes before any of the flowers are even astir, when the arbutus buds are still tight little green points, when the hepaticas have scarcely pushed open their winter sheaths, while their soft little gray-furred heads are still tucked down snugly, like a bird's head under its wing. Before even the snowdrops at our feet and the maples overhead have thought of blossoming, a soft breath may blow across our path filled with this wondrous fragrance. It is like a dream of May. One might believe the fairies were passing by.

For years I was completely baffled by it. But one March, in the farm orchard, I found out part of the secret. I was planting my sweet peas, when the well-remembered and bewildering fragrance blew across me. I sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in the midst of the old orchard, I came upon an old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of Jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness for old apple trees. The fresh-cut wood was moist with sap, and as I bent over it--ah, there it was! Here were my hepaticas, my arbutus, here in the old apple tree! Such a surprise! I sat down beside it to think it over. I was sorry it was cut down, but glad it had told me its secret before it was made into logs and piled in the woodshed. Blazing in the fireplace it would tell me many things, but it might perhaps not have told me that.

And so I knew part of the secret. But only part. For the same fragrance has blown to me often where there were no orchards and no newly felled apple trees, and I have never, except this once, been able to trace it. If it is the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the spring woods full of it? But they are not full of it; it comes only now and then, with tantalizing capriciousness. Do sound trees exhale it, certain kinds, when the sap starts, or must they have been cut or bruised, if not by the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and the ice storms? I do not know. I only know that when that breath of sweetness comes, it is the very breath of spring itself; it is the call of spring out of winter--spring grass.

When the call of the spring grass comes, there is always one spot that draws me with a special insistence, and every year we have much the same talk about it.

"Jonathan," I say, "let's go to the Yellow Valley."

"Why," says Jonathan, "there will be more new birds up on the ridge."

"I don't care about new birds. The old ones do very well for me."

"And you might find the first hepaticas under Indian Rock."

"I know. We'll go there next."

"And if we went farther up the river, we might see some black duck."

"Very likely; but I don't feel as if I particularly had to see black duck to-day."

"What do you have to see?"

"Nothing special. Just plain spring."

That is the charm of the Yellow Valley. It offers no spectacular inducements, no bargain-counter attractions in the shape of new arrivals among the birds or flowers. One returns from it with no trophies of any kind, nothing to put down in one's notebook, if one keeps a notebook,--from which industry may I be forever preserved! But it is a place to go to and be quiet, which is good for us all, especially in the springtime, when there is so much going on in the world, and especially lately, since "nature study" has driven people into being so unceasingly busy when they are outdoors. Opera-glasses and bird books have their place, no doubt, in the advance of mankind, but they often seem to me nothing but more machinery coming in between us and the real things. Perhaps it was once true that when people went out to view "nature," they did not see enough. Now, I fancy, they see too much; they cannot see the spring for the birds. Their motto is that of Rikki-Tikki, the mongoose, "Run and find out"--an excellent motto for a mongoose,--but for people on a spring ramble!

The unquenchable ardor of the bird lover, so called, fills me with dismay. One enthusiast, writing in a school journal, describes the difficulties of following up the birds: "Often eyes all around one's head, with opera-glasses focused at each pair, would not suffice to keep the restless birds in view." If this is the ideal of the bird lover, it is not mine. I wonder she did not wish for extra pairs of legs to match each set of eyes and opera-glasses, and a divisible body, so that she might scamper off in sections after all these marvels. For myself, one pair of eyes gives me, I find, all the satisfaction and delight I know what to do with, and I cannot help feeling that, if I had more, I should have less. The same writer speaks of the "maddening" warbler notes. Why maddening? Because, forsooth, there are thirty warblers, and one cannot learn all their names. What a pity to be maddened by a little warbler! And about a matter of names, too. After all, the bird, the song, is the thing. And it seems a pity to carry the chasing of bird notes quite so far. They are meant, I feel sure, to be hearkened to in quietness of spirit, to be tasted delicately, as one would a wine. The life of the opera-glassed bird hunter, compared to mine, seems to me like the experience of a tea-taster compared to that of one who sits in cozy and irresponsible enjoyment of the cup her friend hands her.

And so there always comes a time in the spring when I must go to my Yellow Valley. A car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and--there! Oh, the soft glory of color! We are at the west end of a miniature valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of yellows and browns. On one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. It is a very tiny valley,--one could almost throw a stone across it,--and the whole bottom is filled with waving grass, waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw color; last year's grass, which the winter snows never seem to mat down, thick-set with the tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and mullein and primrose. The trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.

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