It is eight o'clock of a sunny spring morning. I have been on the road for
almost three hours. At five I left the town of Holt, before six I had
crossed the railroad at a place called Martin's Landing, and an hour ago,
at seven, I could see in the distance the spires of Nortontown. And all
the morning as I came tramping along the fine country roads with my
pack-strap resting warmly on my shoulder, and a song in my throat—just
nameless words to a nameless tune—and all the birds singing, and all
the brooks bright under their little bridges, I knew that I must soon step
aside and put down, if I could, some faint impression of the feeling of
this time and place. I cannot hope to convey any adequate sense of it all—of
the feeling of lightness, strength, clearness, I have as I sit here under
this maple tree—but I am going to write as long as ever I am happy
at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why, here at my very hand lies
the pleasant country road, stretching away toward newer hills and richer
scenes.
Until to-day I have not really been quite clear in my own mind as to the
step I have taken. My sober friend, have you ever tried to do anything
that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane? Try
it! It is easier to commit a thundering crime. A friend of mine delights
in walking to town bareheaded, and I fully believe the neighbourhood is
more disquieted thereby than it would be if my friend came home drunken or
failed to pay his debts.
Here I am then, a farmer, forty miles from home in planting time, taking
his ease under a maple tree and writing in a little book held on his knee!
Is not that the height of absurdity? Of all my friends the Scotch Preacher
was the only one who seemed to understand why it was that I must go away
for a time. Oh, I am a sinful and revolutionary person!
When I left home last week, if you could have had a truthful picture of me—for
is there not a photography so delicate that it will catch the dim
thought-shapes which attend upon our lives?—if you could have had
such a truthful picture of me, you would have seen, besides a farmer named
Grayson with a gray bag hanging from his shoulder, a strange company
following close upon his steps. Among this crew you would have made out
easily:
Two fine cows. Four Berkshire pigs. One team of gray horses, the old mare
a little lame in her right foreleg. About fifty hens, four cockerels, and
a number of ducks and geese.
More than this—I shall offer no explanation in these writings of any
miracles that may appear—you would have seen an entirely respectable
old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it might in the rear. And
in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her immaculate white apron, with the
veritable look in her eyes which she wears when I am not comporting myself
with quite the proper decorum.
Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring after me. My
thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could run away. If you could
have heard that motley crew of the barnyard as I did—the hens all
cackling, the ducks quacking, the pigs grunting, and the old mare neighing
and stamping, you would have thought it a miracle that I escaped at all.
So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of our possessions,
when, as a matter of fact, we do not really possess them, they possess us.
For ten years I have been the humble servant, attending upon the commonest
daily needs of sundry hens, ducks, geese, pigs, bees, and of a fussy and
exacting old gray mare. And the habit of servitude, I find, has worn deep
scars upon me. I am almost like the life prisoner who finds the door of
his cell suddenly open, and fears to escape. Why, I had almost become ALL
farmer.
On the first morning after I left home I awoke as usual about five o'clock
with the irresistible feeling that I must do the milking. So well
disciplined had I become in my servitude that I instinctively thrust my
leg out of bed—but pulled it quickly back in again, turned over,
drew a long, luxurious breath, and said to myself:
“Avaunt cows! Get thee behind me, swine! Shoo, hens!”
Instantly the clatter of mastery to which I had responded so quickly for
so many years grew perceptibly fainter, the hens cackled less
domineeringly, the pigs squealed less insistently, and as for the
strutting cockerel, that lordly and despotic bird stopped fairly in the
middle of a crow, and his voice gurgled away in a spasm of astonishment.
As for the old farmhouse, it grew so dim I could scarcely see it at all!
Having thus published abroad my Declaration of Independence, nailed my
defiance to the door, and otherwise established myself as a free person, I
turned over in my bed and took another delicious nap.
Do you know, friend, we can be free of many things that dominate our lives
by merely crying out a rebellious “Avaunt!”
But in spite of this bold beginning, I assure you it required several days
to break the habit of cows and hens. The second morning I awakened again
at five o'clock, but my leg did not make for the side of the bed; the
third morning I was only partially awakened, and on the fourth morning I
slept like a millionaire (or at least I slept as a millionaire is supposed
to sleep!) until the clock struck seven.
For some days after I left home—and I walked out as casually that
morning as though I were going to the barn—I scarcely thought or
tried to think of anything but the Road. Such an unrestrained sense of
liberty, such an exaltation of freedom, I have not known since I was a
lad. When I came to my farm from the city many years ago it was as one
bound, as one who had lost out in the World's battle and was seeking to
get hold again somewhere upon the realities of life. I have related
elsewhere how I thus came creeping like one sore wounded from the field of
battle, and how, among our hills, in the hard, steady labour in the soil
of the fields, with new and simple friends around me, I found a sort of
rebirth or resurrection. I that was worn out, bankrupt both physically and
morally, learned to live again. I have achieved something of high
happiness in these years, something I know of pure contentment; and I have
learned two or three deep and simple things about life: I have learned
that happiness is not to be had for the seeking, but comes quietly to him
who pauses at his difficult task and looks upward. I have learned that
friendship is very simple, and, more than all else, I have learned the
lesson of being quiet, of looking out across the meadows and hills, and of
trusting a little in God.
And now, for the moment, I am regaining another of the joys of youth—that
of the sense of perfect freedom. I made no plans when I left home, I
scarcely chose the direction in which I was to travel, but drifted out, as
a boy might, into the great busy world. Oh, I have dreamed of that! It
seems almost as though, after ten years, I might again really touch the
highest joys of adventure!
So I took the Road as it came, as a man takes a woman, for better or worse—I
took the Road, and the farms along it, and the sleepy little villages, and
the streams from the hillsides—all with high enjoyment. They were
good coin in my purse! And when I had passed the narrow horizon of my
acquaintanceship, and reached country new to me, it seemed as though every
sense I had began to awaken. I must have grown dull, unconsciously, in the
last years there on my farm. I cannot describe the eagerness of discovery
I felt at climbing each new hill, nor the long breath I took at the top of
it as I surveyed new stretches of pleasant countryside.
Assuredly this is one of the royal moments of all the year—fine,
cool, sparkling spring weather. I think I never saw the meadows richer and
greener—and the lilacs are still blooming, and the catbirds and
orioles are here. The oaks are not yet in full leaf, but the maples have
nearly reached their full mantle of verdure—they are very beautiful
and charming to see.
It is curious how at this moment of the year all the world seems astir. I
suppose there is no moment in any of the seasons when the whole army of
agriculture, regulars and reserves, is so fully drafted for service in the
fields. And all the doors and windows, both in the little villages and on
the farms, stand wide open to the sunshine, and all the women and girls
are busy in the yards and gardens. Such a fine, active, gossipy,
adventurous world as it is at this moment of the year!
It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are afoot. People
who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter now take to the open
road—all the peddlers and agents and umbrella-menders, all the
nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents, all the tramps and scientists and
poets—all abroad in the wide sunny roads. They, too, know well this
hospitable moment of the spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts are
open and that even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of
adventure. Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or listen
to a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!
For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the bustling life
of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul, but strode straight
ahead. The spring has been late and cold: most of the corn and some of the
potatoes are not yet in, and the tobacco lands are still bare and brown.
Occasionally I stopped to watch some ploughman in the fields: I saw with a
curious, deep satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly turned,
glistened in the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something right and fit
about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening I would stop to
watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new brown fields, raising a
cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow crests. The low sun shining
through the dust and glorifying it, the weary-stepping horses, the man all
sombre-coloured like the earth itself and knit into the scene as though a
part of it, made a picture exquisitely fine to see.
And what a joy I had also of the lilacs blooming in many a dooryard, the
odour often trailing after me for a long distance in the road, and of the
pungent scent at evening in the cool hollows of burning brush heaps and
the smell of barnyards as I went by—not unpleasant, not offensive—and
above all, the deep, earthy, moist odour of new-ploughed fields.
And then, at evening, to hear the sound of voices from the dooryards as I
pass quite unseen; no words, but just pleasant, quiet intonations of human
voices, borne through the still air, or the low sounds of cattle in the
barnyards, quieting down for the night, and often, if near a village, the
distant, slumbrous sound of a church bell, or even the rumble of a train—how
good all these sounds are! They have all come to me again this week with
renewed freshness and impressiveness. I am living deep again!
It was not, indeed, until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill,
temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road—the primeval
takings of the senses—the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire to
know something of all the strange and interesting people who are working
in their fields, or standing invitingly in their doorways, or so busily
afoot in the country roads. Let me add, also, for this is one of the most
important parts of my present experience, that this new desire was far
from being wholly esoteric. I had also begun to have cravings which would
not in the least be satisfied by landscapes or dulled by the sights and
sounds of the road. A whiff here and there from a doorway at mealtime had
made me long for my own home, for the sight of Harriet calling from the
steps:
“Dinner, David.”
But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I would
literally “live light in spring.” It was the one and primary condition I
made with myself—and made with serious purpose—and when I came
away I had only enough money in my pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see
me through the first three or four days. Any man may brutally pay his way
anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your humankind
not as a paid lodger but as a friend. Always, it seems to me, I have
wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit the stranger, to that test.
Moreover, how can any man look for true adventure in life if he always
knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from? In a world so
completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered by
security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save the
adventure of poverty?
I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I maintain
that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit to no man.
It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I mean here, if I
may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty. In the lives of
such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that which draws the world
to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived lives of poverty, but
rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very asking, that they
chose poverty as the better way of life.
As for me, I do not in the least pretend to have accepted the final logic
of an achieved poverty. I have merely abolished temporarily from my life a
few hens and cows, a comfortable old farmhouse, and—certain other
emoluments and hereditaments—but remain the slave of sundry cloth
upon my back and sundry articles in my gray bag—including a fat
pocket volume or so, and a tin whistle. Let them pass now. To-morrow I may
wish to attempt life with still less. I might survive without my battered
copy of “Montaigne” or even submit to existence without that sense of
distant companionship symbolized by a postage-stamp, and as for trousers—
In this deceptive world, how difficult of attainment is perfection!
No, I expect I shall continue for a long time to owe the worm his silk,
the beast his hide, the sheep his wool, and the cat his perfume! What I am
seeking is something as simple and as quiet as the trees or the hills—just
to look out around me at the pleasant countryside, to enjoy a little of
this show, to meet (and to help a little if I may) a few human beings, and
thus to get nearly into the sweet kernel of human life. My friend, you may
or may not think this a worthy object; if you do not, stop here, go no
further with me; but if you do, why, we'll exchange great words on the
road; we'll look up at the sky together, we'll see and hear the finest
things in this world! We'll enjoy the sun! We'll live light in spring!
Until last Tuesday, then, I was carried easily and comfortably onward by
the corn, the eggs, and the honey of my past labours, and before Wednesday
noon I began to experience in certain vital centres recognizable symptoms
of a variety of discomfort anciently familiar to man. And it was all the
sharper because I did not know how or where I could assuage it. In all my
life, in spite of various ups and downs in a fat world, I don't think I
was ever before genuinely hungry. Oh, I've been hungry in a reasonable,
civilized way, but I have always known where in an hour or so I could get
all I wanted to eat—a condition accountable, in this world, I am
convinced, for no end of stupidity. But to be both physically and, let us
say, psychologically hungry, and not to know where or how to get anything
to eat, adds something to the zest of life.
By noon on Wednesday, then, I was reduced quite to a point of necessity.
But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long experience the
suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the Man of the Road—the
man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits of the earth without working
for them with his hands. It is a distrust deep-seated and ages old. Nor
can the Man of the Road ever quite understand the Man of the Fields. And
here was I, for so long the stationary Man of the Fields, essaying the
role of the Man of the Road. I experienced a sudden sense of the
enlivenment of the faculties: I must now depend upon wit or cunning or
human nature to win my way, not upon mere skill of the hand or strength in
the bent back. Whereas in my former life, when I was assailed by a Man of
the Road, whether tramp or peddler or poet, I had only to stand
stock-still within my fences and say nothing—though indeed I never
could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my way—and
the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as the dull
security of possession the stolidity of ownership!
Many times that day I stopped by a field side or at the end of a lane, or
at a house-gate, and considered the possibilities of making an attack. Oh,
I measured the houses and barns I saw with a new eye! The kind of country
I had known so long and familiarly became a new and foreign land, full of
strange possibilities. I spied out the men in the fields and did not fail,
also, to see what I could of the commissary department of each farmstead
as I passed. I walked for miles looking thus for a favourable opening—and
with a sensation of embarrassment at once disagreeable and pleasurable. As
the afternoon began to deepen I saw that I must absolutely do something: a
whole day tramping in the open air without a bite to eat is an
irresistible argument.
Presently I saw from the road a farmer and his son planting potatoes in a
sloping field. There was no house at all in view. At the bars stood a
light wagon half filled with bags of seed potatoes, and the horse which
had drawn it stood quietly, not far off, tied to the fence. The man and
the boy, each with a basket on his arm, were at the farther end of the
field, dropping potatoes. I stood quietly watching them. They stepped
quickly and kept their eyes on the furrows: good workers. I liked the
looks of them. I liked also the straight, clean furrows; I liked the
appearance of the horse.
“I will stop here,” I said to myself.
I cannot at all convey the sense of high adventure I had as I stood there.
Though I had not the slightest idea of what I should do or say, yet I was
determined upon the attack.
Neither father nor son saw me until they had nearly reached the end of the
field.
“Step lively, Ben,” I heard the man say with some impatience; “we've got
to finish this field to-day.”
“I AM steppin' lively, dad,” responded the boy, “but it's awful hot. We
can't possibly finish to-day. It's too much.”
“We've got to get through here to-day,” the man replied grimly; “we're
already two weeks late.”
I know just how the man felt; for I knew well the difficulty a farmer has
in getting help in planting time. The spring waits for no man. My heart
went out to the man and boy struggling there in the heat of their field.
For this is the real warfare of the common life.
“Why,” I said to myself with a curious lift of the heart, “they have need
of a fellow just like me.”
At that moment the boy saw me and, missing a step in the rhythm of the
planting, the father also looked up and saw me. But neither said a word
until the furrows were finished, and the planters came to refill their
baskets.
“Fine afternoon,” I said, sparring for an opening.
“Fine,” responded the man rather shortly, glancing up from his work. I
recalled the scores of times I had been exactly in his place, and had
glanced up to see the stranger in the road.
“Got another basket handy?” I asked.
“There is one somewhere around here,” he answered not too cordially. The
boy said nothing at all, but eyed me with absorbing interest. The gloomy
look had already gone from his face.
I slipped my gray bag from my shoulder, took off my coat, and put them
both down inside the fence. Then I found the basket and began to fill it
from one of the bags. Both man and boy looked up at me questioningly. I
enjoyed the situation immensely.
“I heard you say to your son,” I said, “that you'd have to hurry in order
to get in your potatoes to-day. I can see that for myself. Let me take a
hand for a row or two.”
The unmistakable shrewd look of the bargainer came suddenly into the man's
face, but when I went about my business without hesitation or questioning,
he said nothing at all. As for the boy, the change in his countenance was
marvellous to see. Something new and astonishing had come into the world.
Oh, I know what a thing it is to be a boy and to work in trouting time!
“How near are you planting, Ben?” I asked.
“About fourteen inches.”
So we began in fine spirits. I was delighted with the favourable beginning
of my enterprise; there is nothing which so draws men together as their
employment at a common task.
Ben was a lad some fifteen years old-very stout and stocky, with a fine
open countenance and a frank blue eye—all boy. His nose was as
freckled as the belly of a trout. The whole situation, including the
prospect of help in finishing a tiresome job, pleased him hugely. He stole
a glimpse from time to time at me then at his father. Finally he said:
“Say, you'll have to step lively to keep up with dad.”
“I'll show you,” I said, “how we used to drop potatoes when I was a boy.”
And with that I began to step ahead more quickly and make the pieces
fairly fly.
“We old fellows,” I said to the father, “must give these young sprouts a
lesson once in a while.”
“You will, will you?” responded the boy, and instantly began to drop the
potatoes at a prodigious speed. The father followed with more dignity, but
with evident amusement, and so we all came with a rush to the end of the
row.
“I guess that beats the record across THIS field!” remarked the lad,
puffing and wiping his forehead. “Say, but you're a good one!”
It gave me a peculiar thrill of pleasure; there is nothing more pleasing
than the frank admiration of a boy.
We paused a moment and I said to the man: “This looks like fine potato
land.”
“The' ain't any better in these parts,” he replied with some pride in his
voice.
And so we went at the planting again: and as we planted we had great talk
of seed potatoes and the advantages and disadvantages of mechanical
planters, of cultivating and spraying, and all the lore of prices and
profits. Once we stopped at the lower end of the field to get a drink from
a jug of water set in the shade of a fence corner, and once we set the
horse in the thills and moved the seed farther up the field. And tired and
hungry as I felt I really enjoyed the work; I really enjoyed talking with
this busy father and son, and I wondered what their home life was like and
what were their real ambitions and hopes. Thus the sun sank lower and
lower, the long shadows began to creep into the valleys, and we came
finally toward the end of the field. Suddenly the boy Ben cried out:
“There's Sis!”
I glanced up and saw standing near the gateway a slim, bright girl of
about twelve in a fresh gingham dress.
“We're coming!” roared Ben, exultantly.
While we were hitching up the horse, the man said to me:
“You'll come down with us and have some supper.”
“Indeed I will,” I replied, trying not to make my response too eager.
“Did mother make gingerbread to-day?” I heard the boy whisper audibly.
“Sh-h—” replied the girl, “who is that man?”
“I don't know” with a great accent of mystery—“and dad don't
know. Did mother make gingerbread?”
“Sh-h—he'll hear you.”
“Gee! but he can plant potatoes. He dropped down on us out of a clear
sky.”
“What is he?” she asked. “A tramp?”
“Nope, not a tramp. He works. But, Sis, did mother make gingerbread?”
So we all got into the light wagon and drove briskly out along the shady
country road. The evening was coming on, and the air was full of the scent
of blossoms. We turned finally into a lane and thus came promptly, for the
horse was as eager as we, to the capacious farmyard. A motherly woman came
out from the house, spoke to her son, and nodded pleasantly to me. There
was no especial introduction. I said merely, “My name is Grayson,” and I
was accepted without a word.
I waited to help the man, whose name I had now learned—it was
Stanley—with his horse and wagon, and then we came up to the house.
Near the back door there was a pump, with a bench and basin set just
within a little cleanly swept, open shed. Rolling back my collar and
baring my arms I washed myself in the cool water, dashing it over my head
until I gasped, and then stepping back, breathless and refreshed, I found
the slim girl, Mary, at my elbow with a clean soft towel. As I stood
wiping quietly I could smell the ambrosial odours from the kitchen. In all
my life I never enjoyed a moment more than that, I think.
“Come in now,” said the motherly Mrs. Stanley.
So we filed into the roomy kitchen, where an older girl, called Kate, was
flying about placing steaming dishes upon the table. There was also an
older son, who had been at the farm chores. It was altogether a fine,
vigorous, independent American family. So we all sat down and drew up our
chairs. Then we paused a moment, and the father, bowing his head, said in
a low voice:
“For all Thy good gifts, Lord, we thank Thee. Preserve us and keep us
through another night.”
I suppose it was a very ordinary farm meal, but it seems to me I never
tasted a better one. The huge piles of new baked bread, the sweet farm
butter, already delicious with the flavour of new grass, the bacon and
eggs, the potatoes, the rhubarb sauce, the great plates of new, hot
gingerbread and, at the last, the custard pie—a great wedge of it,
with fresh cheese. After the first ravenous appetite of hardworking men
was satisfied, there came to be a good deal of lively conversation. The
girls had some joke between them which Ben was trying in vain to fathom.
The older son told how much milk a certain Alderney cow had given, and Mr.
Stanley, quite changed now as he sat at his own table from the rather grim
farmer of the afternoon, revealed a capacity for a husky sort of fun,
joking Ben about his potato-planting and telling in a lively way of his
race with me. As for Mrs. Stanley, she sat smiling behind her tall coffee
pot, radiating good cheer and hospitality. They asked me no questions at
all, and I was so hungry and tired that I volunteered no information.
After supper we went out for half or three quarters of an hour to do some
final chores, and Mr. Stanley and I stopped in the cattle yard and looked
over the cows, and talked learnedly about the pigs, and I admired his
spring calves to his hearts content, for they really were a fine lot. When
we came in again the lamps had been lighted in the sitting-room and the
older daughter was at the telephone exchanging the news of the day with
some neighbour—and with great laughter and enjoyment. Occasionally
she would turn and repeat some bit of gossip to the family, and Mrs.
Stanley would claim:
“Do tell!”
“Can't we have a bit of music to-night?” inquired Mr. Stanley.
Instantly Ben and the slim girl, Mary, made a wild dive for the front room—the
parlour—and came out with a first-rate phonograph which they placed
on the table.
“Something lively now,” said Mr. Stanley.
So they put on a rollicking negro song called. “My Georgia Belle,” which,
besides the tuneful voices, introduced a steamboat whistle and a musical
clangour of bells. When it wound up with a bang, Mr. Stanley took his big
comfortable pipe out of his mouth and cried out:
“Fine, fine!”
We had further music of the same sort and with one record the older
daughter, Kate, broke into the song with a full, strong though
uncultivated voice—which pleased us all very much indeed.
Presently Mrs. Stanley, who was sitting under the lamp with a basket of
socks to mend, began to nod.
“Mother's giving the signal,” said the older son.
“No, no, I'm not a bit sleepy,” exclaimed Mrs. Stanley.
But with further joking and laughing the family began to move about. The
older daughter gave me a hand lamp and showed me the way upstairs to a
little room at the end of the house.
“I think,” she said with pleasant dignity, “you will find everything you
need.”
I cannot tell with what solid pleasure I rolled into bed or how soundly
and sweetly I slept.
This was the first day of my real adventures.
