Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

_An Encounter_

Once on the kind of day called ‘weather breeder,’
When the heat slowly hazes and the sun
By its own power seems to be undone,
I was half boring through, half climbing through
A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar
And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated,
And sorry I ever left the road I knew,
I paused and rested on a sort of hook
That had me by the coat as good as seated,
And since there was no other way to look,
Looked up toward heaven, and there against the blue,
Stood over me a resurrected tree,
A tree that had been down and raised again--
A barkless spectre. He had halted too,
As if for fear of treading upon me.
I saw the strange position of his hands--
Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands
Of wire with something in it from men to men.
‘You here?’ I said. ‘Where aren’t you nowadays?
And what’s the news you carry--if you know?
And tell me where you’re off for--Montreal?
Me? I’m not off for anywhere at all.
Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways
Half looking for the orchid Calypso.’

_Range-Finding_

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

_The Hill Wife_

LONELINESS

_Her Word_

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here--
With birds that fill their breasts
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.

HOUSE FEAR

Always--I tell you this they learned--
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

THE SMILE

_Her Word_

I didn’t like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled--did you see him?--I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window-latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
Of what the tree might do.

THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her--

And didn’t answer--didn’t speak--
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

_The Bonfire_

‘Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them to-night,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.
Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.
The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough
Down dark converging paths between the pines.
Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.
Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile
The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk
Of people brought to windows by a light
Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.
Rouse them all, both the free and not so free
With saying what they’d like to do to us
For what they’d better wait till we have done.
Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,
If that is what the mountain ever was--
And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will....’

‘And scare you too?’ the children said together.

‘Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire
Begin in smudge with ropy smoke and know
That still, if I repent, I may recall it,
But in a moment not: a little spurt
Of burning fatness, and then nothing but
The fire itself can put it out, and that
By burning out, and before it burns out
It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle--
Done so much and I know not how much more
I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.
Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on
A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,
As once it did with me upon an April.
The breezes were so spent with winter blowing
They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them
Short of the perch their languid flight was toward;
And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven
As I walked once around it in possession.
But the wind out of doors--you know the saying.
There came a gust. You used to think the trees
Made wind by fanning since you never knew
It blow but that you saw the trees in motion.
Something or someone watching made that gust.
It put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass
Of over-winter with the least tip-touch
Your tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.
The place it reached to blackened instantly.
The black was almost all there was by day-light,
That and the merest curl of cigarette smoke--
And a flame slender as the hepaticas,
Blood-root, and violets so soon to be now.
But the black spread like black death on the ground,
And I think the sky darkened with a cloud
Like winter and evening coming on together.
There were enough things to be thought of then.
Where the field stretches toward the north
And setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it
To flames without twice thinking, where it verges
Upon the road, to flames too, though in fear
They might find fuel there, in withered brake,
Grass its full length, old silver golden-rod,
And alder and grape vine entanglement,
To leap the dusty deadline. For my own
I took what front there was beside. I knelt
And thrust hands in and held my face away.
Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.
A board is the best weapon if you have it.
I had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,
And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother
And heat so close in; but the thought of all
The woods and town on fire by me, and all
The town turned out to fight for me--that held me.
I trusted the brook barrier, but feared
The road would fail; and on that side the fire
Died not without a noise of crackling wood--
Of something more than tinder-grass and weed--
That brought me to my feet to hold it back
By leaning back myself, as if the reins
Were round my neck and I was at the plough.
I won! But I’m sure no one ever spread
Another color over a tenth the space
That I spread coal-black over in the time
It took me. Neighbors coming home from town
Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there
While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there
When they had passed an hour or so before
Going the other way and they not seen it.
They looked about for someone to have done it.
But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering
Where all my weariness had gone and why
I walked so light on air in heavy shoes
In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.
Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?’

‘If it scares you, what will it do to us?’

‘Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That’s what for reasons I should like to know--
If you can comfort me by any answer.’

‘Oh, but war’s not for children--it’s for men.’

‘Now we are digging almost down to China.
My dears, my dears, you thought that--we all thought it.
So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,--
And children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new--something we had forgotten:
_War is for everyone, for children too._
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.’

_A Girl’s Garden_

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, ‘Why not?’

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, ‘Just it.’

And he said, ‘That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.’

It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

_Now_ when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, ‘_I_ know!

It’s as when I was a farmer--’
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

_Locked Out_

AS TOLD TO A CHILD

When we locked up the house at night,
We always locked the flowers outside
And cut them off from window light.
The time I dreamed the door was tried
And brushed with buttons upon sleeves,
The flowers were out there with the thieves.
Yet nobody molested them!
We did find one nasturtium
Upon the steps with bitten stem.
I may have been to blame for that:
I always thought it must have been
Some flower I played with as I sat
At dusk to watch the moon down early.

_The Last Word of a Bluebird_

AS TOLD TO A CHILD

As I went out a Crow
In a low voice said ‘Oh,
I was looking for you.
How do you do?
I just came to tell you
To tell Lesley (will you?)
That her little Bluebird
Wanted me to bring word
That the north wind last night
That made the stars bright
And made ice on the trough
Almost made him cough
His tail feathers off.
He just had to fly!
But he sent her Good-bye,
And said to be good,
And wear her red hood,
And look for skunk tracks
In the snow with an axe--
And do everything!
And perhaps in the spring
He would come back and sing.’

_‘Out, Out--’_

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap--
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off--
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little--less--nothing!--and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

_Brown’s Descent_

OR

THE WILLY-NILLY SLIDE

Brown lived at such a lofty farm
That everyone for miles could see
His lantern when he did his chores
In winter after half-past three.

And many must have seen him make
His wild descent from there one night,
’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything,
Describing rings of lantern light.

Between the house and barn the gale
Got him by something he had on
And blew him out on the icy crust
That cased the world, and he was gone!

Walls were all buried, trees were few:
He saw no stay unless he stove
A hole in somewhere with his heel.
But though repeatedly he strove

And stamped and said things to himself,
And sometimes something seemed to yield,
He gained no foothold, but pursued
His journey down from field to field.

Sometimes he came with arms outspread
Like wings, revolving in the scene
Upon his longer axis, and
With no small dignity of mien.

Faster or slower as he chanced,
Sitting or standing as he chose,
According as he feared to risk
His neck, or thought to spare his clothes,

He never let the lantern drop.
And some exclaimed who saw afar
The figures he described with it,
‘I wonder what those signals are

Brown makes at such an hour of night!
He’s celebrating something strange.
I wonder if he’s sold his farm,
Or been made Master of the Grange.’

He reeled, he lurched, he bobbed, he checked;
He fell and made the lantern rattle
(But saved the light from going out.)
So half-way down he fought the battle,

Incredulous of his own bad luck.
And then becoming reconciled
To everything, he gave it up
And came down like a coasting child.

‘Well--I--be--’ that was all he said,
As standing in the river road,
He looked back up the slippery slope
(Two miles it was) to his abode.

Sometimes as an authority
On motor-cars, I’m asked if I
Should say our stock was petered out,
And this is my sincere reply:

Yankees are what they always were.
Don’t think Brown ever gave up hope
Of getting home again because
He couldn’t climb that slippery slope;

Or even thought of standing there
Until the January thaw
Should take the polish off the crust.
He bowed with grace to natural law,

And then went round it on his feet,
After the manner of our stock;
Not much concerned for those to whom,
At that particular time o’clock,

It must have looked as if the course
He steered was really straight away
From that which he was headed for--
Not much concerned for them, I say;

No more so than became a man--
_And_ politician at odd seasons.
I’ve kept Brown standing in the cold
While I invested him with reasons;

But now he snapped his eyes three times;
Then shook his lantern, saying, ‘Ile’s
’Bout out!’ and took the long way home
By road, a matter of several miles.

_The Gum-Gatherer_

There overtook me and drew me in
To his down-hill, early-morning stride,
And set me five miles on my road
Better than if he had had me ride,
A man with a swinging bag for load
And half the bag wound round his hand.
We talked like barking above the din
Of water we walked along beside.
And for my telling him where I’d been
And where I lived in mountain land
To be coming home the way I was,
He told me a little about himself.
He came from higher up in the pass
Where the grist of the new-beginning brooks
Is blocks split off the mountain mass--
And hopeless grist enough it looks
Ever to grind to soil for grass.
(The way it is will do for moss.)
There he had built his stolen shack.
It had to be a stolen shack
Because of the fears of fire and loss
That trouble the sleep of lumber folk:
Visions of half the world burned black
And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke.
We know who when they come to town
Bring berries under the wagon seat,
Or a basket of eggs between their feet;
What this man brought in a cotton sack
Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce.
He showed me lumps of the scented stuff
Like uncut jewels, dull and rough.
It comes to market golden brown;
But turns to pink between the teeth.

I told him this is a pleasant life
To set your breast to the bark of trees
That all your days are dim beneath,
And reaching up with a little knife,
To loose the resin and take it down
And bring it to market when you please.

_The Line-Gang_

Here come the line-gang pioneering by.
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead
They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.
But in no hush they string it: they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taut,
To hold it hard until they make it fast,
To ease away--they have it. With a laugh,
An oath of towns that set the wild at naught
They bring the telephone and telegraph.

_The Vanishing Red_

He is said to have been the last Red Man
In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed--
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher’s license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
‘Whose business,--if I take it on myself,
Whose business--but why talk round the barn?--
When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.’
You can’t get back and see it as he saw it.
It’s too long a story to go into now.
You’d have to have been there and lived it.
Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.

Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red Man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.
‘Come, John,’ he said, ‘you want to see the wheel pit?’

He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came up stairs alone--and gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch--then.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.

_Snow_

The three stood listening to a fresh access
Of wind that caught against the house a moment,
Gulped snow, and then blew free again--the Coles
Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,
Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.

Meserve was first to speak. He pointed backward
Over his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,
‘You can just see it glancing off the roof
Making a great scroll upward toward the sky,
Long enough for recording all our names on.--
I think I’ll just call up my wife and tell her
I’m here--so far--and starting on again.
I’ll call her softly so that if she’s wise
And gone to sleep, she needn’t wake to answer.’
Three times he barely stirred the bell, then listened.
‘Why, Lett, still up? Lett, I’m at Cole’s. I’m late.
I called you up to say Good-night from here
Before I went to say Good-morning there.--
I thought I would.--I know, but, Lett--I know--
I could, but what’s the sense? The rest won’t be
So bad.--Give me an hour for it.--Ho, ho,
Three hours to here! But that was all up hill;
The rest is down.--Why no, no, not a wallow:
They kept their heads and took their time to it
Like darlings, both of them. They’re in the barn.--
My dear, I’m coming just the same. I didn’t
Call you to ask you to invite me home.--’
He lingered for some word she wouldn’t say,
Said it at last himself, ‘Good-night,’ and then
Getting no answer, closed the telephone.
The three stood in the lamplight round the table
With lowered eyes a moment till he said,
‘I’ll just see how the horses are.’

‘Yes, do,’
Both the Coles said together. Mrs. Cole
Added: ‘You can judge better after seeing.--
I want you here with me, Fred. Leave him here,
Brother Meserve. You know to find your way
Out through the shed.’

‘I guess I know my way,
I guess I know where I can find my name
Carved in the shed to tell me who I am
If it don’t tell me where I am. I used
To play--’

‘You tend your horses and come back.
Fred Cole, you’re going to let him!’

‘Well, aren’t you?
How can you help yourself?’

‘I called him Brother.
Why did I call him that?’

‘It’s right enough.
That’s all you ever heard him called round here.
He seems to have lost off his Christian name.’

‘Christian enough I should call that myself.
He took no notice, did he? Well, at least
I didn’t use it out of love of him,
The dear knows. I detest the thought of him
With his ten children under ten years old.
I hate his wretched little Racker Sect,
All’s ever I heard of it, which isn’t much.
But that’s not saying--Look, Fred Cole, it’s twelve,
Isn’t it, now? He’s been here half an hour.
He says he left the village store at nine.
Three hours to do four miles--a mile an hour
Or not much better. Why, it doesn’t seem
As if a man could move that slow and move.
Try to think what he did with all that time.
And three miles more to go!’

‘Don’t let him go.
Stick to him, Helen. Make him answer you.
That sort of man talks straight on all his life
From the last thing he said himself, stone deaf
To anything anyone else may say.
I should have thought, though, you could make him hear you.’

‘What is he doing out a night like this?
Why can’t he stay at home?’

‘He had to preach.’

‘It’s no night to be out.’

‘He may be small,
He may be good, but one thing’s sure, he’s tough.’

‘And strong of stale tobacco.’

‘He’ll pull through.’

‘You only say so. Not another house
Or shelter to put into from this place
To theirs. I’m going to call his wife again.’

‘Wait and he may. Let’s see what he will do.
Let’s see if he will think of her again.
But then I doubt he’s thinking of himself.
He doesn’t look on it as anything.’

‘He shan’t go--there!’

‘It _is_ a night, my dear.’

‘One thing: he didn’t drag God into it.’

‘He don’t consider it a case for God.’

‘You think so, do you? You don’t know the kind.
He’s getting up a miracle this minute.
Privately--to himself, right now, he’s thinking
He’ll make a case of it if he succeeds,
But keep still if he fails.’

‘Keep still all over.
He’ll be dead--dead and buried.’

‘Such a trouble!
Not but I’ve every reason not to care
What happens to him if it only takes
Some of the sanctimonious conceit
Out of one of those pious scalawags.’

‘Nonsense to that! You want to see him safe.’

‘You like the runt.’

‘Don’t you a little?’

‘Well,
I don’t like what he’s doing, which is what
You like, and like him for.’

‘Oh, yes you do.
You like your fun as well as anyone;
Only you women have to put these airs on
To impress men. You’ve got us so ashamed
Of being men we can’t look at a good fight
Between two boys and not feel bound to stop it.
Let the man freeze an ear or two, I say.--
He’s here. I leave him all to you. Go in
And save his life.--All right, come in, Meserve.
Sit down, sit down. How did you find the horses?’

‘Fine, fine.’

‘And ready for some more? My wife here
Says it won’t do. You’ve got to give it up.’

‘Won’t you to please me? Please! If I say please?
Mr. Meserve, I’ll leave it to _your_ wife.
What _did_ your wife say on the telephone?’

Meserve seemed to heed nothing but the lamp
Or something not far from it on the table.
By straightening out and lifting a forefinger,
He pointed with his hand from where it lay
Like a white crumpled spider on his knee:
‘That leaf there in your open book! It moved
Just then, I thought. It’s stood erect like that,
There on the table, ever since I came,
Trying to turn itself backward or forward,
I’ve had my eye on it to make out which;
If forward, then it’s with a friend’s impatience--
You see I know--to get you on to things
It wants to see how you will take, if backward
It’s from regret for something you have passed
And failed to see the good of. Never mind,
Things must expect to come in front of us
A many times--I don’t say just how many--
That varies with the things--before we see them.
One of the lies would make it out that nothing
Ever presents itself before us twice.
Where would we be at last if that were so?
Our very life depends on everything’s
Recurring till we answer from within.
The thousandth time may prove the charm.--That leaf!
It can’t turn either way. It needs the wind’s help.
But the wind didn’t move it if it moved.
It moved itself. The wind’s at naught in here.
It couldn’t stir so sensitively poised
A thing as that. It couldn’t reach the lamp
To get a puff of black smoke from the flame,
Or blow a rumple in the collie’s coat.
You make a little foursquare block of air,
Quiet and light and warm, in spite of all
The illimitable dark and cold and storm,
And by so doing give these three, lamp, dog,
And book-leaf, that keep near you, their repose;
Though for all anyone can tell, repose
May be the thing you haven’t, yet you give it.
So false it is that what we haven’t we can’t give;
So false, that what we always say is true.
I’ll have to turn the leaf if no one else will.
It won’t lie down. Then let it stand. Who cares?’

‘I shouldn’t want to hurry you, Meserve,
But if you’re going--Say you’ll stay, you know.
But let me raise this curtain on a scene,
And show you how it’s piling up against you.
You see the snow-white through the white of frost?
Ask Helen how far up the sash it’s climbed
Since last we read the gage.’

‘It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the window-pane.’

‘Brother Meserve, take care, you’ll scare yourself
More than you will us with such nightmare talk.
It’s you it matters to, because it’s you
Who have to go out into it alone.’

‘Let him talk, Helen, and perhaps he’ll stay.’

‘Before you drop the curtain--I’m reminded:
You recollect the boy who came out here
To breathe the air one winter--had a room
Down at the Averys’? Well, one sunny morning
After a downy storm, he passed our place
And found me banking up the house with snow.
And I was burrowing in deep for warmth,
Piling it well above the window-sills.
The snow against the window caught his eye.
“Hey, that’s a pretty thought”--those were his words.
“So you can think it’s six feet deep outside,
While you sit warm and read up balanced rations.
You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”
Those were his words. And he went home and all
But banked the daylight out of Avery’s windows.
Now you and I would go to no such length.
At the same time you can’t deny it makes
It not a mite worse, sitting here, we three,
Playing our fancy, to have the snowline run
So high across the pane outside. There where
There is a sort of tunnel in the frost
More like a tunnel than a hole--way down
At the far end of it you see a stir
And quiver like the frayed edge of the drift
Blown in the wind. I _like_ that--I like _that_.
Well, now I leave you, people.’

‘Come, Meserve,
We thought you were deciding not to go--
The ways you found to say the praise of comfort
And being where you are. You want to stay.’

‘I’ll own it’s cold for such a fall of snow.
This house is frozen brittle, all except
This room you sit in. If you think the wind
Sounds further off, it’s not because it’s dying;
You’re further under in the snow--that’s all--
And feel it less. Hear the soft bombs of dust
It bursts against us at the chimney mouth,
And at the eaves. I like it from inside
More than I shall out in it. But the horses
Are rested and it’s time to say good-night,
And let you get to bed again. Good-night,
Sorry I had to break in on your sleep.’

‘Lucky for you you did. Lucky for you
You had us for a half-way station
To stop at. If you were the kind of man
Paid heed to women, you’d take my advice
And for your family’s sake stay where you are.
But what good is my saying it over and over?
You’ve done more than you had a right to think
You could do--_now_. You know the risk you take
In going on.’

‘Our snow-storms as a rule
Aren’t looked on as man-killers, and although
I’d rather be the beast that sleeps the sleep
Under it all, his door sealed up and lost,
Than the man fighting it to keep above it,
Yet think of the small birds at roost and not
In nests. Shall I be counted less than they are?
Their bulk in water would be frozen rock
In no time out to-night. And yet to-morrow
They will come budding boughs from tree to tree
Flirting their wings and saying Chickadee,
As if not knowing what you meant by the word storm.’

‘But why when no one wants you to go on?
Your wife--she doesn’t want you to. We don’t,
And you yourself don’t want to. Who else is there?’

‘Save us from being cornered by a woman.
Well, there’s’--She told Fred afterward that in
The pause right there, she thought the dreaded word
Was coming, ‘God.’ But no, he only said
‘Well, there’s--the storm. That says I must go on.
That wants me as a war might if it came.
Ask any man.’

He threw her that as something
To last her till he got outside the door.
He had Cole with him to the barn to see him off.
When Cole returned he found his wife still standing
Beside the table near the open book,
Not reading it.

‘Well, what kind of a man
Do you call that?’ she said.

‘He had the gift
Of words, or is it tongues, I ought to say?’

‘Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?’

‘Or disregarding people’s civil questions--
What? We’ve found out in one hour more about him
Than we had seeing him pass by in the road
A thousand times. If that’s the way he preaches!
You didn’t think you’d keep him after all.
Oh, I’m not blaming you. He didn’t leave you
Much say in the matter, and I’m just as glad
We’re not in for a night of him. No sleep
If he had stayed. The least thing set him going.
It’s quiet as an empty church without him.’

‘But how much better off are we as it is?
We’ll have to sit here till we know he’s safe.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’ll want to, but I shouldn’t.
He knows what he can do, or he wouldn’t try.
Get into bed I say, and get some rest.
He won’t come back, and if he telephones,
It won’t be for an hour or two.’

‘Well then.
We can’t be any help by sitting here
And living his fight through with him, I suppose.’

* * * * *

Cole had been telephoning in the dark.
Mrs. Cole’s voice came from an inner room:
‘Did she call you or you call her?’

‘She me.
You’d better dress: you won’t go back to bed.
We must have been asleep: it’s three and after.’

‘Had she been ringing long? I’ll get my wrapper.
I want to speak to her.’

‘All she said was,
He hadn’t come and had he really started.’

‘She knew he had, poor thing, two hours ago.’

‘He had the shovel. He’ll have made a fight.’

‘Why did I ever let him leave this house!’

‘Don’t begin that. You did the best you could
To keep him--though perhaps you didn’t quite
Conceal a wish to see him show the spunk
To disobey you. Much his wife’ll thank you.’

‘Fred, after all I said! You shan’t make out
That it was any way but what it was.
Did she let on by any word she said
She didn’t thank me?’

‘When I told her “Gone,”
“Well then,” she said, and “Well then”--like a threat.
And then her voice came scraping slow: “Oh, you,
Why did you let him go?”’

‘Asked why we let him?
You let me there. I’ll ask her why she let him.
She didn’t dare to speak when he was here.
Their number’s--twenty-one? The thing won’t work.
Someone’s receiver’s down. The handle stumbles.
The stubborn thing, the way it jars your arm!
It’s theirs. She’s dropped it from her hand and gone.’

‘Try speaking. Say “Hello!”’

‘Hello. Hello.’

‘What do you hear?’

‘I hear an empty room--
You know--it sounds that way. And yes, I hear--
I think I hear a clock--and windows rattling.
No step though. If she’s there she’s sitting down.’

‘Shout, she may hear you.’

‘Shouting is no good.’

‘Keep speaking then.’

‘Hello. Hello. Hello.
You don’t suppose--? She wouldn’t go out doors?’

‘I’m half afraid that’s just what she might do.’

‘And leave the children?’

‘Wait and call again.
You can’t hear whether she has left the door
Wide open and the wind’s blown out the lamp
And the fire’s died and the room’s dark and cold?’

‘One of two things, either she’s gone to bed
Or gone out doors.’

‘In which case both are lost.
Do you know what she’s like? Have you ever met her?
It’s strange she doesn’t want to speak to us.’

‘Fred, see if you can hear what I hear. Come.’

‘A clock maybe.’

‘Don’t you hear something else?’

‘Not talking.’

‘No.’

‘Why, yes, I hear--what is it?’

‘What do you say it is?’

‘A baby’s crying!
Frantic it sounds, though muffled and far off.
Its mother wouldn’t let it cry like that,
Not if she’s there.’

‘What do you make of it?’

‘There’s only one thing possible to make,
That is, assuming--that she has gone out.
Of course she hasn’t though.’ They both sat down
Helpless. ‘There’s nothing we can do till morning.’

‘Fred, I shan’t let you think of going out.’

‘Hold on.’ The double bell began to chirp.
They started up. Fred took the telephone.
‘Hello, Meserve. You’re there, then!--And your wife?
Good! Why I asked--she didn’t seem to answer.
He says she went to let him in the barn.--
We’re glad. Oh, say no more about it, man.
Drop in and see us when you’re passing.’

‘Well,
She has him then, though what she wants him for
I _don’t_ see.’

‘Possibly not for herself.
Maybe she only wants him for the children.’

‘The whole to-do seems to have been for nothing.
What spoiled our night was to him just his fun.
What did he come in for?--To talk and visit?
Thought he’d just call to tell us it was snowing.
If he thinks he is going to make our house
A half-way coffee house ’twixt town and nowhere--’

‘I thought you’d feel you’d been too much concerned.’

‘You think you haven’t been concerned yourself.’

‘If you mean he was inconsiderate
To rout us out to think for him at midnight
And then take our advice no more than nothing,
Why, I agree with you. But let’s forgive him.
We’ve had a share in one night of his life.
What’ll you bet he ever calls again?’

_The Sound of the Trees_

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

_New Hampshire_

I met a lady from the South who said
(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):
‘None of my family ever worked, or had
A thing to sell.’ I don’t suppose the work
Much matters. You may work for all of me.
I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.
The having anything to sell is what
Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveller from Arkansas
Who boasted of his state as beautiful
For diamonds and apples. ‘Diamonds
And apples in commercial quantities?’
I asked him, on my guard. ‘Oh yes,’ he answered,
Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.
‘I see the porter’s made your bed,’ I told him.

I met a Californian who would
Talk California--a state so blessed,
He said, in climate, none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity.
‘Just the way Steffanson runs on,’ I murmured,
‘About the British Arctic. That’s what comes
Of being in the market with a climate.’

I met a poet from another state,
A zealot full of fluid inspiration,
Who in the name of fluid inspiration,
But in the best style of bad salesmanship,
Angrily tried to make me write a protest
(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.
He didn’t even offer me a drink
Until I asked for one to steady _him_.
This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.

The only person really soiled with trade
I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire
Was someone who had just come back ashamed
From selling things in California.
He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls
On turrets like Constantinople, deep
In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,
As if to put forever out of mind
The hope of being, as we say, received.
I found him standing at the close of day
Inside the threshold of his open barn,
Like a lone actor on a gloomy stage--
And recognized him through the iron grey
In which his face was muffled to the eyes
As an old boyhood friend, and once indeed
A drover with me on the road to Brighton.
His farm was ‘grounds,’ and not a farm at all;
His house among the local sheds and shanties
Rose like a factor’s at a trading station.
And he was rich, and I was still a rascal.
I couldn’t keep from asking impolitely,
Where had he been and what had he been doing?
How did he get so? (Rich was understood.)
In dealing in ‘old rags’ in San Francisco.
Oh it was terrible as well could be.
We both of us turned over in our graves.
Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,
One each of everything as in a show-case
Which naturally she doesn’t care to sell.

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,
And make the most of it for better or worse.
He’s your one chance to score against the state).
She had one Daniel Webster. He was all
The Daniel Webster ever was or shall be.
She had the Dartmouth needed to produce him.

I call her old. She has one family
Whose claim is good to being settled here
Before the era of colonization,
And before that of exploration even.
John Smith remarked them as he coasted by
Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf
At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself
They weren’t Red Indians, but veritable
Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,
Like those who furnished Adam’s sons with wives;
However uninnocent they may have been
In being there so early in our history.
They’d been there then a hundred years or more.
Pity he didn’t ask what they were up to
At that date with a wharf already built,
And take their name. They’ve since told me their name--
Today an honored one in Nottingham.
As for what they were up to more than fishing--
Suppose they weren’t behaving Puritanly,
The hour had not yet struck for being good,
Mankind had not yet gone on the Sabbatical.
It became an explorer of the deep
Not to explore too deep in others’ business.
Did you but know of him, New Hampshire has
One real reformer who would change the world
So it would be accepted by two classes,
Artists the minute they set up as artists,
Before, that is, they are themselves accepted,
And boys the minute they get out of college.
I can’t help thinking those are tests to go by.

And she has one I don’t know what to call him,
Who comes from Philadelphia every year
With a great flock of chickens of rare breeds
He wants to give the educational
Advantages of growing almost wild
Under the watchful eye of hawk and eagle--
Dorkings because they’re spoken of by Chaucer,
Sussex because they’re spoken of by Herrick.

She has a touch of gold. New Hampshire gold--
You may have heard of it. I had a farm
Offered me not long since up Berlin way
With a mine on it that was worked for gold;
But not gold in commercial quantities.
Just enough gold to make the engagement rings
And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.
What gold more innocent could one have asked for?
One of my children ranging after rocks
Lately brought home from Andover or Canaan
A specimen of beryl with a trace
Of radium. I know with radium
The trace would have to be the merest trace
To be below the threshold of commercial;
But trust New Hampshire not to have enough
Of radium or anything to sell.

A specimen of everything, I said.
She has one witch--old style. She lives in Colebrook.
(The only other witch I ever met
Was lately at a cut-glass dinner in Boston.
There were four candles and four people present.
The witch was young, and beautiful (new style),
And open-minded. She was free to question
Her gift for reading letters locked in boxes.
Why was it so much greater when the boxes
Were metal than it was when they were wooden?
It made the world seem so mysterious.
The S’ciety for Psychical Research
Was cognizant. Her husband was worth millions.
I think he owned some shares in Harvard College.)

New Hampshire _used_ to have at Salem
A company we called the White Corpuscles,
Whose duty was at any hour of night
To rush in sheets and fools’ caps where they smelled
A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented
And give someone the Skipper Ireson’s Ride.

One each of everything as in a show-case.
More than enough land for a specimen
You’ll say she has, but there there enters in
Something else to protect her from herself.
There quality makes up for quantity.
Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.
The farm I made my home on in the mountains
I had to take by force rather than buy.
I caught the owner outdoors by himself
Raking up after winter, and I said,
‘I’m going to put you off this farm: I want it.’
‘Where are you going to put me? In the road?’
‘I’m going to put you on the farm next to it.’
‘Why won’t the farm next to it do for you?’
‘I like this better.’ It was really better.

Apples? New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,
With no suspicion in stem-end or blossom-end
Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,
And so not good for anything but cider.
Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats
Far up the birches out of reach of man.

A state producing precious metals, stones,
And--writing; none of these except perhaps
The precious literature in quantity
Or quality to worry the producer
About disposing of it. Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to _seem_
So much more business-like than business men.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

She’s one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont’s the other. And the two have been
Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old
In many Marches. And they lie like wedges,
Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
And are a figure of the way the strong
Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
One thick where one is thin and vice versa.
New Hampshire raises the Connecticut
In a trout hatchery near Canada,
But soon divides the river with Vermont.
Both are delightful states for their absurdly
Small towns--Lost Nation, Bungey, Muddy Boo,
Poplin, Still Corners (so called not because
The place is silent all day long, nor yet
Because it boasts a whisky still--because
It set out once to be a city and still
Is only corners, cross-roads in a wood).
And I remember one whose name appeared
Between the pictures on a movie screen
Election night once in Franconia,
When everything had gone Republican
And Democrats were sore in need of comfort:
Easton goes Democratic, Wilson 4
Hughes 2. And everybody to the saddest
Laughed the loud laugh, the big laugh at the little.
New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,
Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs
At Littleton (four thousand), Littleton
Laughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and
Franconia laughs, I fear,--did laugh that night--
At Easton. What has Easton left to laugh at,
And like the actress exclaim, ‘Oh my God’ at?
There’s Bungey; and for Bungey there are towns,
Whole townships named but without population.

Anything I can say about New Hampshire
Will serve almost as well about Vermont,
Excepting that they differ in their mountains.
The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;
New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.

I had been coming to New Hampshire mountains.
And here I am and what am I to say?
Here first my theme becomes embarrassing.
Emerson said, ‘The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land with little men.’
Another Massachusetts poet said,
‘I go no more to summer in New Hampshire.
I’ve given up my summer place in Dublin.’
But when I asked to know what ailed New Hampshire,
She said she couldn’t stand the people in it,
The little men (it’s Massachusetts speaking).
And when I asked to know what ailed the people,
She said, ‘Go read your own books and find out.’
I may as well confess myself the author
Of several books against the world in general.
To take them as against a special state
Or even nation’s to restrict my meaning.
I’m what is called a sensibilitist,
Or otherwise an environmentalist.
I refuse to adapt myself a mite
To any change from hot to cold, from wet
To dry, from poor to rich, or back again.
I make a virtue of my suffering
From nearly everything that goes on round me.
In other words, I know wherever I am,
Being the creature of literature I am,
I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.
Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:
‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.’
Samoa, Russia, Ireland I complain of,
No less than England, France and Italy.
Because I wrote my novels in New Hampshire
Is no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire.

When I left Massachusetts years ago
Between two days, the reason why I sought
New Hampshire, not Connecticut,
Rhode Island, New York, or Vermont was this:
Where I was living then, New Hampshire offered
The nearest boundary to escape across.
I hadn’t an illusion in my hand-bag
About the people being better there
Than those I left behind. I thought they weren’t.
I thought they couldn’t be. And yet they were.
I’d sure had no such friends in Massachusetts
As Hall of Windham, Gay of Atkinson,
Bartlett of Raymond (now of Colorado),
Harris of Derry, and Lynch of Bethlehem.