Minstrel Weather Part 2

CHAPTER IX.

SUMMER PAUSES

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Where the slow creek is putting out to sea, freighted with seed and wan leaf, cardinal-flowers watch the waters reddened by their image. Old gold and ocher, the ferns beneath move listlessly up and down with the ripple. As spring walks first along the stream, autumn, too, comes early to the waterside, to kindle swamp maples and give the alder colors of onyx. The l.u.s.trous indigo of the silky cornel hangs there in profusion.

Scented white b.a.l.l.s of the river bush have lost their golden haloes, and even the red-grounded purple of the ironweed is turning umber. The fruited sweetbrier shows rust. Fall's ancient tapestry, the browns of decay worked over with carmine, olive, maroon, and buff, is being hung, but where the blue lobelia is cl.u.s.tered in the lowground summer pauses.

A parting sun catches the clear yellow of curtsying, transfigured birch leaves, and looks back, waiting, to give September's landscape a hesitant farewell. It seems early to go. Pickerelweed is azure still.

Among the green bogs the fragrant lady's-tresses wear the white timidity of April, and the three petals of the enameled arrowhead flower are dusty with gold. But seeds wrapped up in brown are scattering.

Remembrance yields to prophecy.

The harvesters of grain and gra.s.s have gone, and the tinted stubble is full of crickets and monotonous cicadas. Now the crumbling furrow is folded back behind the plow and corn knives are swinging close to the solemn pumpkins, for in cornfield, vineyard, and orchard and in the squirrel's domain the last harvests of all are hastening to ripeness as the sunset chill gives warning of a disaster foretold since August by the katydid. The honey-colored pippins, cracked and mellow in the brooding heat, encounter the windfalls of October's trees-deepening red, soft yellow, and polished green. Great, sheltering leaves are dropping from the burdened vine. Every breath tells of fruits, drying herbs, and the late flowers that in deserted gardens are most pungent in September-marigolds, tansy, and the cinnamon pink. Pennyroyal and mint are betrayed. Thorn apples, not near ripened, are knocked from the twig by south-bound birds.

Still, among wine-colored and vermilion foliage, the acorn is green, though flushed wintergreen berry and red-gemmed partridge vine proclaim autumn along the forest floor. The auburn splendors are upon the sumac and the burning-bush of old-fas.h.i.+oned dooryards, where, too, the smoke tree holds its haze of seeds. Sometimes a gentian stands erect among dead gra.s.ses-a slim senora with a fringed mantilla swirled close about her shoulders in the chilly dusk. The closed gentian keeps its darkly impenetrable blue beside the pink-tipped companion stalks of the snake's-head. Fair are the sheathed berries of the p.r.i.c.kly ash-but daggers to the taste. Often they grow among wild cherries, which, juiceless now, are sweet as dried fruits from Persia. And there are the black nannyberries with their watermelon flavor, and the first spicy wild grapes.

Immortelles are bleached paper white on sandy hills. The nightshade holds berries of three colors, pa.s.sing from brilliant green to clouded amber and deep crimson lake, and still upon it hangs the mysterious blue blossom, shunned. Dogwood boughs are gorgeous as a sunset, and the thick scarlet cl.u.s.ters droop from the mountain ash. The last humming birds haunt tanned honeysuckles. Languid, but clinging yet to the sun world, the yellow lily dies on weedy streams. If the all-conquering goldenrod hangs the way for summer's pa.s.sing with the color of regret, it has made every meadow El Dorado with its plumes, sprays, clumps, and spears.

Spray upon delicate spray, the fairy lavender aster has taken possession of the roadsides and fields, and before it, far into the shade, goes the white wood aster, mingling with the flamboyant leaves of dwarf oaks and the glistening red seeds of the wild turnip. To make September's pageant the scented, pale petals of spring, the drowsy contentedness of summer's fulfillment and the Tyrian dyes of fall are joined.

The pallid clematis, in flower along rail fences, still hides the blacksnake, chipmunk, and red squirrel-sometimes even the unsylphlike woodchuck-but the marshes and the branches of the lakeside pines have felt for days past the brief touch of many a strange bird's feet as the vanguard migrants seek regions of longer days. Finely dressed visitors have come to the blue-berried juniper and the monstrous pokeweed of the terra-cotta stem. The heron breaks his profound meditation to engulf a meadow frog, for he will not leave until the wild geese "with mingled sound of horn and bells" press south above the watercourses. Starling and blue jay stay awhile to oblige with their clatter to the dawn. The fur has thickened on the woods creatures.

The blind might hear September in the uproarious arguments of the crow, the despondent cries of katydid, tree toad, and hoot owl. In the air is reluctance, pause. Flaming festoons of woodbine and poison ivy begarland the stone wall. Summer cannot wait. Elegiac purples of the aster beckon, and the b.u.t.terfly sleeps long upon the thistle, but she would not go now, in the month of the first bittersweet and the last sweet pea.

CHAPTER X.

WHEN THE OAKS WEAR DAMSON

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The wild ducks are streaming south upon their journey of uncounted days.

Resting a little after sunset upon the cedar-bordered pond, they are startled into flight again by some hound hunting in the night, and with beating wing and eerie cry go on. The later flying geese rise clamorous from among the cat-tails, and in silent haste the blue heron and the pair of sad old cranes that had roosted in a dead elm alongsh.o.r.e take the chill, invisible trail. When day comes in spreading fire the crows will humorously watch these wander-birds from the forest edges. They feel no southward impulse. Circling the clearing, they comment in uproar upon the most advisable oak for their afternoon symposium, expand their polished feathers, and, seated in a derisive row, caw a farewell to the wader's long, departing legs. Now the mountaineer's girl, remembering Old World peasant tales that never have been told her, hurries indoors at nightfall from the hallooing specter of the Wild Huntsman in the clouds, who is but the anxious leader of the flying wedge.

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Buckwheat stubble in October is such a crimson as no Fiesolan rose garden ever unfurled. Gray hill slopes of the North are festal with its color, insistent even through rains, glowing from rose madder to maroon.

Lower stretches out the pale yellow of oats stubble, which breaks into flas.h.i.+ng splinters under the noon sun. The wheat fields show ocher, and darker-burnt sienna at the roots-lie the reaped fields of barley. Small rash flowers, fancying that the ground between the grain stalks has been cultivated especially for them, now that they see the sun freely again, put on the petals of spring amid this fair desolation. Strawberry blossoms, visibly fey, appear; long-stemmed and scanty-flowered fall dandelions; an ill-timed display of April's b.u.t.tercups. The blackberry vines go richly dyed-superb red-velvet settings for the jewels of frost.

Down in the valley, through the wood-smoke haze, move the slow apple wagons through the lanes. This is appleland. Northern Spy and Lemon Pippin are ripe to cracking; Baldwins will be mellow by Twelfth-night, the russet at Easter. Gorgeous and ephemeral hangs the Maiden's Blush.

The strawberry apples are like embers on the little trees, rubies of the orchard. Lady Sweets and Dominies are respectfully being urged into the cellar, and for those who will pay to learn the falseness of this world's shows the freight cars are receiving Ben Davises. Sheep-noses, left often on the boughs, will hold cold nectar after the black frosts have killed the last marigold. They lie, dull red, by the orchard fence in the early snow, their blunt expression revealing no secrets. You have to know about them. Nothing is more inscrutable than a sheep-nose.

Fast above the indigo crests stir the light clouds, harried by the west wind whereon the hawk floats across the valley. In the afternoon October's lover takes the hill path, mica-gemmed, that leads between birches of the translucent yellow leaf and maples still green but wearing scarlet woodbine like a gypsy's sash. For here the sunset lingers till the stars, though from the valley's goblet evening has sipped the waning sunlight like a clear amber wine. But take at morning the path through brown lowgrounds, or close along the wood where frost sleeps late, for here that flower of desire, the fringed gentian, grows.

Its blue is less mysterious and deep than the closed gentian's, and yet how many name it the cup of autumn delight!

In the woods where leafless boughs give them blue sky at last are revealed in quaint perfection the ferneries of the moss: palm trees towering higher than a snail's house, gallant green plumes with cornelians at the tip, vast tropical forests spreading for long inches, gray trailing rivers and orange cliffs of lichen, leagues of delicate jungle lost under a fallen leaf. A beetle clad in s.h.i.+ning mail presses through the wilderness. A cobalt dragonfly lights on a shaken palm.

Pursuing a rolling hickory nut, the chipmunk brings a hurricane-but these are elastic trees.

That same mischief maker, incurably curious, chases every stranger, shooting along the stone wall and pausing to peer out from the crevices with unregenerate eyes. The handsome but vain woodp.e.c.k.e.r pounds at the grub-dowered tree he has chosen to persecute. Enormously ingenuous, the wayside cow lumbers reproachfully out of the path, knocking the grains of excellent make-believe coffee from the withered dock. The drumming of a partridge in his solitary transport sounds where reddened dogwood glorifies a clump of firs. Sometimes the kittle pheasant, hardly at home in our woods, ducks her head and vanishes in the briers.

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Now the harvest moon, yellower than the hunter's moon of ending autumn or the strawberry moon that looks upon June's roses, rises for husking time. It is the last harvest; when the corn is in, winter comes. Piled, tumbling ears, their grain set in many a curious pattern, go by to the sorting floor and crib, with pumpkins, the satraps of New England, perched in rickety fas.h.i.+on on the gleaming load. The mountain ash hangs flamboyant cl.u.s.ters along the road from the field. Obedient to the frost, the acorns are dropping, and the first chestnuts lie, polished mahogany, in the whitened gra.s.s at sunrise. The s.h.a.gbark has scattered its largess, the b.u.t.ternut its dainties in their staining coats. Against the slopes the tinted fern patches show bronze, russet, and pansy brown.

Speaking October and our own purple East, the tall asters, darkening from lavender to the ultimate shadowy violet, join the goldenrod. Sumacs are thronging, with their proudly blazoned crests; the haw is hung with Chinese scarlet lanterns; sweetbrier, stem and leaf, is scented of menthol and spices of the Orient. The oaks stand regal in umber and damson. Who that has known October could ever forget? How quiet the nights are after frost!

CHAPTER XI.

NOVEMBER TRAITS

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By the time November comes the year is used to the caprices of the sun and no longer frantically brings out flowers for his gaze or hides them in hurt surprise from his indifference. Now the year is resigned, untroubled of hope, far off from impatient April with her craving and effort. Experienced month, November waits ready to face the snows. She wraps up the buds too warmly for sleet to pierce their overcoats, comforts the roots in the woods with mats of wrecked leaves, spreads a little jewelry of frost as a warning before the black frosts come, and for all else lives in the moment. November has been through this before.

But sometimes, in a reverie, she delights the blue jays and persistent wild asters by a day of Indian summer.

There has been a great deal of ill feeling about Indian summer, and the kinder way is not to persecute those who have since youth believed and will maintain forever that it comes in October. Victims of this perverted fancy, they will go through life calling the first hot spell after Labor Day Indian summer. Every fall one explains to them that this brief season of perfection may come as late as Thanksgiving, but the very next year they will be heard to murmur, under frostless skies, "Well, we are having our Indian summer." Let them go their indoors way, or follow the deserting robins down to Paraguay! Indian summer could just as well come when the oaks have turned forlorn if it wanted to. In truth, it comes and goes, by no means exhausted in a solitary burst of flaring sumacs, fringed gentians lighted by frost along the rims, damson-colored alder leaves and old yellow pumpkins, perilously exposed among forgotten furrows, now that the corn is being drawn in. It goes, and comes again, which is its charm-the one time of year that cannot be calendared.

There is in all the world a small, choice coterie of people who like November and March best of the months, and it must be admitted that these are often a bit arrogant about their refined perceptions. They manage to look down upon the many of us who prefer the daisy fields to the time "when hills take on the n.o.ble lines of death." But whims of the wors.h.i.+per steal no splendor from the G.o.d. June has nothing to place beside a moonlit November night, whose shadow dance of multiform boughs is never seen through leaves, while shadows on the snow are hard of outline, unlike the illusive phantoms running over autumn's brown gra.s.s.

June has no flowers so quaint, pathetic, and austere as the trembling weeds of November. What does the goldenrod, white with age, care for frost? All winter it will shake out seeds unthriftily upon the snow, standing with a calm brotherhood who have gone beyond dependence on the day. June's forests do not take a thousand colors under a low sun.

June's gray dews have no magnificence of frost. June's incorrigible sparrows are not the brave, flitting "s...o...b..rds" whose sins we forgive, once we hear them chirping in a blizzard. June is a lyric, November a hymn.

The squirrels have put away enough nuts to last through the holidays, and after that they come out and get something else-no one ever knows what. They have gone off with most of the acorns, leaving the fairies their usual autumn supply of cupless saucers. No birds worth fighting with are left, for the crows will not notice them, so they go for the chipmunks. Sometimes at the wood's edge a bird that came only with the blossoms and that should long since have gone sits lost, half grotesque, on a stark twig-spent and beautiful singer, belated by perversity or by untimely faintness of wing! The muskrat's winter house is ready, but no happy quiet such as his good citizens.h.i.+p deserves is in store for him, because soon the trappers will begin their patrol of the forest, and his skin, called wild Patagonian ox, the exquisite new fur, will bring a good price. Emotional wild geese still pa.s.s overhead in the dawns and sunsets-the crows can scarcely conceal their amus.e.m.e.nt: "What nonsense, to be always coming or going!" The crow does not remain in the pale North simply out of devotion to us. He is above mortal vicissitudes; behind his demoniac eye dwells a critique of humanity which he would not be bothered to utter if he could. The soul of the satirist once abode in a crow.

Forsaken nests and rattling reeds along the stream, pools in the hollows edged with thin ice, ragged leaves clutched at by the winds, desperate buds of hepatica and cowslip where a sloping bank catches warmth at noon, fences stripped of vines and ghostly with dead clematis, a few frozen apples swinging on the top boughs, trampled fields and pelting rain-and with it all a grandeur more serene than melancholy. November's lovers are not perverse, declaring this. They see half-indicated colors and hear low sounds. They love the mellow light better than the blaze of rich July, and they are loyal to November because she speaks in quiet tones not heard through the eagerness or snow silence of other months.

It is the sentimentalist who sees only gloom and the weariness of departure now. November is ruddier than many a day of spring and the sharp air forbids languor. Indian summer, her gift and our most fleeting season, is like the autumn ecstasy of the partridge, pa.s.sionate and irresistible, but not ending in despondency because he knows it will return, and it is like joy in that it cannot be foreseen nor detained.

The baccha.n.a.l may have dreaded November, not the dryad.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CHRISTMAS WOODS

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The Southern woods hang their Christmas tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs high. Laurel and rhododendron, mistletoe and holly, reach up against the walls of tinted bark. Our Northern forests trail greens along the floor, and roped ground pine, p.r.i.c.king through the p.r.o.ne leaves or a gentle snow, appears as a procession of tiny palm trees, come North for the holiday, surprised and lost, but determined to keep together. Under the haw bushes and over spruce roots, wherever shade was thick last summer, partridge vines twine red-berried wreaths and the little plants of wintergreen flavor and of that wandering name hold their rubies low on the mountain side. After the enduring snows have come, these glimmering fruits will be requisitioned-dug out by the furry owners of such plantations on days when even covered roots seem barren of sap, and nuts should really be saved awhile longer. Clumps of sword fern, beaten down by November rains, are round green mats; other ferns long ago were brown. But seldom save in its sunsets and woodlands has December color.

Ponds, fanged with ice, lie sullen or stir resentfully into whitecaps.

The sky is stony and often vanishes in brooding fog. Uncloaked, but courageous in their gray armor, the trees wait tensely for the intolerable onslaught of the cold: the blizzard with knives of sleet.