CHAPTER XVI.

THE BROWN FRONTIER

[Ill.u.s.tration]

One warm March noon a hushing wing is lifted from the piping nest of earth. Voices of forest floor, tree trunk, and lowground break forth, never to be silent again until Thanksgiving weather finds a muted world.

Croon and murmur from the swaying gra.s.ses, brief lyrics from the top of the thorn, a sunrise chant from the bee tree, rise and fall through all the hours of dew and light, intense in the sun-rusted fields, climbing to an ecstatic swan song when frosts hover close. Whoever walks through middle realms of the woods, never lying on the mosses nor winning to skyward branches of the trees, has not shared the earth's most ardent life-the pensive songs a bird sings merely for himself; his impulsive, goalless flights; and rarer still the industry and traffic at the roots of growth: the epic of the ground.

Cricket follows pickering frog and cicada cricket. That earliest invisible singer asks only a little warmth in the waters of the pond to melt the springs of frozen song. He comes with lady's-tresses, p.u.s.s.y willows, and unfurling lily pads. The cricket, sleepy-voiced in the August afternoon, grows gay at twilight, and does his best when the firefly and bat are abroad, darting out from the creeper-veiled bark and setting sail upon the placid air. Locusts play persistently a G string out of tune until, when the first goldenrod peers above the yarrow, the overwhelming night chorus of the katydids is heard, lifted bravely again and again within the domains of autumn, not quenched before the bittersweet berry and the chestnut fling open portals and surrender to the cold.

Little they know of trees who have not seen spruce and larches against the deep October sky, looking straight up from a yielding club-moss pillow. The outlines and colors of the quiet branches are shown most memorably upon the vault of that arching lapis-lazuli roof, draped with floating chiffon of the clouds. Climb up among the boughs, and the carven quality is gone. They are dim and soft. You must go close to earth to behold tree-top forms. The supine view is magical.

Revealed in uncanny splendor by the death of verdure, brilliant and evil fungi come from the dark mold in fall, orange and copper, vermilion and cinnabar, dwelling as vampires upon trees brought low. Some wear the terra-cotta of the alert little lizards that, inquisitive as squirrels, will lift their heads from bark or stone and give back gaze for gaze. As leaves that came from the sap of roots go back to the roots in ashes, so ants take care that fallen oaks shall be transformed into the soil from which young oaks will spring, and brown dust, when they have ended, is all that abides of the tallest tree. Among them pa.s.s the bobbing, glistening beetles. This immortal and thronging activity of the loam can be heard, if you bend low enough and listen long.

When the air is frost-clear fairy landscapes, hidden since spring came with mists and masking leaves, rise with an effect of unbeheld creation.

Small pools appear, and avenues among the bracken that still wave banners of chestnut and old gold. The lonely homes of ground-nesting birds grow visible. Trinkets are scattered as the forest makes ready for night-tiny cones, abandoned snail sh.e.l.ls, and feathers which the woodp.e.c.k.e.r and oriole dropped when they took leave. The sun dapples with yellow the partridge haunts where once drooped films of maidenhair fern.

The home that the squirrel built for his summer idyl is shattered by the winds aloft and falls to earth with other finished things. The feathery wrack of cat-tails sails the waters and is hung upon the gra.s.ses of the marsh. Fallow fields spread a tangle of livid stems, but jewels lie in the wood road, for berries, the last harvest, are shaken down by bird gleaners from vine and shrub, where they hang in festal plenty, so that all hardy creatures that do not fly from winter to the South or to an underground Nirvana may here find reward. Dark blue beads drop from the woodbine. The rose keeps her carmine caskets, full of other roses; but the bayberry is generous with dove-gray pebble seeds. Witch-hazel, reversing seasons like the eccentric trout-who, after all, probably enjoys the solitude at the stream-heads after the other fish have gone-sends wide her mysterious fusillade, and that, too, finds its aim in the floor of the forest.

Life more remote than that of snowfield or jungle, beneath our tread, guarded from our glances and our hearing unless we seek it out, the subtle cycles of the soil go on everlastingly, alien even to those who know in intimacy the meadows and the woods. Vigorously though it toils, there is a peace in the vision of continuity delicately given. Most of the singers in the mowing gra.s.s live for a day, yet next morning the song ascends unbroken. Here on the frontier between the world of the air and that within the earth pa.s.sports are granted back and forth-the red lily is summoned from the depths; the topmost acorn, lifting its cup toward the sky, obediently falls and pa.s.ses through the dark barrier, to return when the life-call bids. Steadily go on arrival and departure.

The gorgeous lichen is hung upon the rotting log. White rue rises and white snows sink. Fire demons split the rocks, and after them in a thousand years comes bloodroot. Floods rush down, and windflowers and cities follow; and leisurely, another spring, the gates that received them part, and a legion of new cowslips marches out.

CHAPTER XVII.

FAR ALTARS

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Guarded by treacherous green marshes whose murmuring rushes will close without a change of cadence over the despair of the unwarned, in August there lives a scene of tender and appealing beauty. The languid creek, turned the color of iron rust with its plunder-spoil of the wild and impractical fertility of the roots of bog and bracken-pauses in a pool that shows now brown, now sorrel, now satiny green as the clouds wait or hasten above and the supple rushes lean back and forth. This is the tourney field of gorgeous dragonflies. Emerald, gold, and amethyst, they hold resplendent play, sparkling above the water like magnets of light, causing the placid depths to shimmer, and drawing the minnows from their sunlit rest. Even the bird-dog does not know this pool. No messenger more personal than a prowling shot comes there from man.

It is a st.u.r.dy conceit that wonders why Nature should spend her freshest art on treasure scenes she decrees invisible, as if the mother of mountains, tempests, deserts, toiled anxiously for the approval of a particular generation, keeping one eye on Mr. Gray and the other on Mr.

Emerson in the hope that they will justify her flower blushing unseen and her excusable rhodora. Nature is far too unmoral to bother about rendering economists an account for her spendthrift loveliness. She willfully deserts the imitation Sicilian garden, though she would be well paid to stay, and rollicks in the jungle, clothing magnificently the useless snake and leopard, dressing their breakfast in paradise plumes, puzzling Victorian poets, and badly scaring the urban manicurist, who returns after her first country vacation with decided views concerning the cheerful humanity of streets compared with lodges in the wilderness.

Were Nature careworn and personal, where should we turn for consolation or rest? Hers is the tonic gift of a strength that, underlying all life, does not pity or praise. As in the Cave of the Winds the most restless spirit surely might find peace, so in the eternal changefulness of the forest under the touch of forces fierce or serene we find the soul of quiet because the powers at work are beyond our control, control us utterly, hold us in an immense and soothing grasp where thought and energy are fused and contend no more. So those who live upon the ocean come to possess that which they will not barter for ease, and so the timber cruiser shortens his visit to town. They would not tell what they gain who relinquish readily the things for which others pour out their years upon the ground that commerce may grow. It is because words are not fashioned to speak what shapes the wind takes, the motion whereby mists climb after the sun out of ravines, or how the tropic orchids lift at daybreak among their fragrant shadows wings of ivory and fawn that drooped against ferny trunks.

Many days must bloom and fade between you and the sound of human voices before, in the wilderness, there can be surrender to the giant arms that forever hold the body, and to the spirit, supreme and unemotional, that has sped beyond the utmost outposts the mind ever reached. But after the homecoming-when the confused echoes of a swarming, blind humanity are lost in the exalted quiet of wide s.p.a.ces-the vast impersonality of woods and plains, swamps, hills, and sea, takes on a tenderness more deep than lies in human gift and a glorious hostility that calls to combat without grudge or motive, enn.o.bling because it gives no mercy; challenges alike the craft of man and the strength of the hills.

The exuberant fancy of a less earnest day made air and fire the dwellings of creatures formed like ourselves, and, though immortal, shod with lightning, guarded from common sight, they were afflicted with our own vexations, our loves and hates. Nymph and naiad, faun and satyr, were always plotting and gossiping, and little better were the subsequent gnomes and fairies-more personal and cantankerous than persons; resorting upon occasion to divorce; tangling skeins, and teasing kind old horses. These were not the earth deities.

Earth deities wear no human shape. No one has looked upon the sky fire's face, the pinions of the gale. Enormously they have wrought, without regard for man and sharing no pa.s.sion, yet yielding sometimes their limitless force to the mind that soared with them. In the age of winged serpents, in the days when a.s.syria was mistress, they were the same, holding an equal welcome for the boy and sage, unchanging and unresting, free from mortal attributes of good and evil, mighty and healing as no half-human G.o.d could be. Therefore that lavish scattering of beauty without regard to man. Therefore the wonder given to all who dare call to them when far from other men.

The disrepute of the pathetic fallacy has come from making the forest sentimental. Sentient beyond all doubt its lovers know it is. Even as water visibly rebels, warring with headlands and leaping after the wind, and as it slumbers dimpling and caresses the swimmer, so the woodlands are solemn and aloof, or breathe to give the open-hearted their vast serenity. The nymph or fairy rises at the bidding of imagination, but the everlasting deities of the elements, past our reckoning elder than they, need no fiction. They are presences, and accord communion. They can be gentle as the twilight call of quail. They can be indifferent and gigantic as the prairie fire and typhoon. But they brood to-day as yesterday over cities that they will not enter, but which sometimes they destroy. They march above mountain ridges and loiter among flowered laurel, impartial as nothing else is, and in their dispa.s.sionate companionship supremely consoling, offering for playthings the ripple and the gleam.

THE END