University of Virginia Library

XIV
Picnic Pictures

Her white house is the same, with a difference. It was always a house fitted to the person like a garment, a friendly house with peace in the corners, a house warm with sun or firelight; yet I think we always used the house merely as a starting-place for picnics, for running away into the out-of-doors with a well-stocked basket. We are at best only reformed dryads, my friend and I, and I am not even reformed. I think perhaps that it was in like manner that we used our two selves, merely as a starting-point for picnics, for the leap into the infinite, the challenging of space and time, the tossing of stars like play-balls from one to the other, always with the joy of the word shaping on the tongue to the gleam in a friend's eye. We are lovers of words, I and she. True we also had talk in the library, dusked with books, dead men's spirits packed shoulder to shoulder on the shelves. There was brave firelight in the library, and quiet candles, and there was also Xerxes. The great gray Persian curled on one

corner of the big desk. Even asleep he dominated the home in his sole masculinity. Yet to me he was sexless and sphinxlike except when he forsook his Oriental calm for strange gambols in the white moonlight, a bounding gray shape of a tiger grace. Sometimes Xerxes rose and stretched as if our conversation bored him, sometimes his great purring drowned out the Occidental flippancy of our chat. He was more king than cat, and he always made me a little uncomfortable, that Xerxes. To-day he is not dead but deposed. His place on the desk is usurped by a sturdy box of cigars.

However happily we might talk in the library we always knew we were better without a roof, for in the blood of the born picnicker there is something that must always be running, dancing, flying. Out-of-doors, there were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk delved too deep, and the pine-tops to fill all pauses with quiet music. We were the better picnickers because we lived for the most part in life's schoolroom. We counted our picnic days and sorted them into due order of excellence, some better, some not quite so merry, yet all very good. But lately I had begun to wonder about the picnics, for the difference in the white, hill-girdled house is a

husband. When our friends marry we always wonder about the picnics, for sorrow is always a third comrade to hold two friends' hands the tighter, and to keep their feet more closely in step; it is happiness that may sever and un-self people.

This, our first married picnic, dawned as brisk and bright as any. The master is not with us. He departs each morning for a mysterious place called "The Works." That is something I have always noticed in husbands, that tendency to go forth to "The Works." Somehow no matter how hard women may toil for their daily bread, they never seem to belong to "The Works" of the world. The white house bustles with picnic preparations. It has to bustle when Jennie is in it. Jennie? Well, Jennie might be called the steam-engine at the middle of the merry-go-round. Some day I think the world will grow wise enough to stop talking about the servant question, and begin to study the philosophy that is still often to be found going about wrapped in a maid's cap and apron. Jennie, a little person quick of foot, bounces up and down like a merry ball, and cries to the blue May morning while she butters sandwiches, "Picnic time has come again! Picnic time has come again!" Yet I never heard of Jennie's going

on a picnic; do people ever know, I wonder, how much of other people's unselfishness must go to the making of anybody's Eden?

The hall rocks to the bouncings and barkings of Mac, for he, too, feels picnic in the air. Mac is a newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare, ready tied beneath a tree to carry us over the hills and far away. When Adam came to this Eden, he brought his animals with him, a method much better than the Scriptural one, for it must have been a strain on any honeymoon, that influx of indiscriminate elephant and dinosaur, cormorant and anteater, and what not. The animals here were carefully chosen, Mac, the shaggy, clumsy, warm-hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a lady of the old South, having all such a lady's charm and grace and fundamental loyalty touched with just the dash of deviltry considered meet to spice the masculine palate. It is with the clatter of Mac's ecstatic barking as he plunges before Peggy's light hoofs that we go driving forth toward the blue, hillswept horizon.

There is a tentative venturesomeness about my friend's driving, for horsemanship with her is a recent accomplishment, and a proud one, to the zest of which Peggy contributes with a pricking of ears and a graceful dip to

the side of the road before every motor-car. Mac trots briskly in front or behind, or to the side. His path through life is one of friendly detours. He will never accomplish any great deeds in dogdom. He is one of the simple souls unconscious of their magnetism. There is not an animal by the roadside that does n't come ambling up to his genial little nose. Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily across the pasture to chat with him at the bars, and no dog, big or little, fails to wish Mac good-morning.

It is the kind of morning for good wishes both for dogs and men. Knotted old farmers, seeing our picnic faces and picnic basket, grin and twinkle, sharing the May sunshine. The hills are a dim blue against a sky still softer. Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than green, are starred with bluets. Far off there, below a shaggy stretch of pines, is a field so golden with dandelions that it quivers as if held by midsummer beat.

We don't know where we are going; that is always the charm of our picnics, to follow the will of the road. It carries us past a sawmill in the wood. Its stridency and the tang of fresh sawdust strike sharp across the air fragrant with fern. Then the road is off again across the open, cleaving farms with their broad

greening fields. The meadowlarks ring out their calls to us. The bobolinks dart and dive and sing. I turn to my companion in sudden question: "Now that you are married to a woodsman, do you know anything more about birds?"

"Oh, no," she answers easily, "we know only the nice birds"; thus reassuring me that in her company I need fear, no more than of old, to meet any but the best bird society, robins and blackbirds and orioles and the other long-established families, and reassuring me also as to my fear that the one left behind at "The Works" might prove to be one of these bugaboo birdmen, of all beings the most subtly superior. In fact, it is very difficult to extract good conversation from any kind of human encyclopedia, ornithological or other.

Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are snowed over with white, but the apple blossoms are unopened, turning to a deep rose amid the pale-green leaves. The orchards are nearly human in their individuality, whether they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy and gnarled and steadfast, or a band of little budding baby trees toddling up a hill. There are no great waters in this countryside, but many little glinting brooks, pattering

downhill beside our wheels, then meandering through meadows beneath their bushy willows. We are minded to follow a brook and let it lead us to perfect picnic. It leads us, of course, up a hill and up, away from all farms, all valleys, into a deep woods road, hushed and strange, and at last beckons us aside from the road itself, with a twinkle of white birch stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and amber.

It takes a long time to tie and blanket Peggy while I sit dreaming in the dappled shade beside the musical rush of water, haunted by my friend's own song that once set all this woodland madness to elfin rhythms. But my mood is interrupted by the thumping down of the stout picnic basket. She is smilingly tolerant of my dryad whimseys, but for herself, nowadays, she wishes to unpack that basket and get settled. It is for me also, perhaps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other dryad turned domestic; for me, brook water still has power to turn me dizzy and to make my heart stop beating.

It is the same basket we used to carry, but, like the house, it has a difference. There is a great object concealed in ebony leather, and it is called the "wap-eradicator." The term is profoundly masculine, for a "wap" is some

evil-eyed foreigner who might disturb our picnic privacy, and his eradicator is a pistol. There is also a marvelous jackknife which I pause in unpacking to examine. It again is no lady's toy, seeing that it has not only all the blades a lady might require, but in addition a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a tack-puller and a can-opener. There is stout enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we always used to carry china, feminine and fragile. Food, much of that,—but then we always did take food, for I have noticed that poets need a deal of victualing. In fact, roast beef is about the best thing you can do for anybody's imagination. One packet I myself put in for old sake's sake, despite her laughter, a yellow envelope packed with her typed poetry. "We'll never look at it," she said, and she generally knows. She pulls forth now some scribbled tablets, skeleton stories of my own, "Your little deedles," she designates them in genial contempt, and plants the cream jar upon them.

Presently she is off to gather fagots for the fire, admonishing my absentmindedness, "Don't let Mac eat the food before we do." I note how much handier she has grown in all wood-lore. To-day the fire needs no coaxing, also it's a much smaller fire than we used to

build. We used to have a scorching splutter for a wee bit of coffee. This fire goes briskly and to the point, showering us now and then with cinders, yet on the whole well-behaved. In other days we toasted our bacon on forked sticks, but there's a fine frying-pan now, with rings to thrust a rod into, tightening it with twigs. Bacon and eggs sizzle merrily, and the coffee-kettle boils its cover off. We sit smut-cheeked and zestful, and exhibit a great capacity for sandwiches. There is much complacency in our manners. Her coffee, she remarks, "has seven kinds of sticks in it, but is perfectly potable." The fire, that low, leaping ruddiness against a gray boulder, is the best fire she "ever personally conducted." As for me, there is plenty of chuckle in me, too, but I am thinking, when shall we begin to talk, for was that not what we always went to the woods for? Somehow, what with building fires, and brewing and frying, with eating and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to eat and drink, there has not been time for talking. That will come later, when we have packed away the sandwiches we could not eat, and given Mac his drink from our emptied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps of sugar. Then surely at last we shall talk, about poems and stories, and all things writable, and all things livable. Sometimes I think she guesses what I am waiting for and regards me with a twinkle, while she moves about light-footed, setting away our clutter.

But afterwards she is sleepy, lying stretched in flickering shadow on the brown pine needles; and I, the picnic place has caught me again into its spell. Nowhere does spring come stepping so delicately as in New England. In other places there is more riot and revelry in the carnival of bursting blossoms and leaf. In New England spring has the face of a girl nun. There are white violets in our woods and white birch stems. The very light has a quality soft and rare. The sky is the Quaker ladies' own color. Across the swirling water that leaps down the rock path, the face of a hill rises high into the sky. It is all gray boulder and brown, with a film of pale green over all, touched here and there by the dreamy white of the shadbush. Nearer by, great boulders at the waterside below us are moss-covered, and across them the dappled shade of little leaves goes flickering. The beautiful tree shapes are unhidden, gray stems twining with brown. There is a satin sheen in the rod of light that lines each trunk-shaft turned to the sun. Just now, sailing from nowhere, across the green-veiled gray of

the hill opposite, there fluttered a white butterfly.

After a long time I touch the envelope packed with poetry, and move it tentatively toward my friend's hand. She shoves it quietly aside. Drowsy though she is, she has an eye open to watch Peggy's glossy brown head tossing down there in an amber-lit wood space, and to see that Mac does not wake from his nap, where he lies only half visible against the russet leaves he has chosen to match his coat. Nowadays any soaring talk may be interrupted by a hearty "Whoa, Peggy!" or a "Down, Mac!" It is no poor punctuation, no unworthy anchorage, for people whose feet have often ached from treading the tree-tops.

She has tossed aside her poetry, but will listen to my stories. I am eager to tell her about all the new people in my brain. She brushes the cobwebs from their heads and from mine with all her old acumen, knowing, in all the spacious sanities of the married woman, that I need to write, while I, I know, too, that she need not. If we did not, each of us, understand, could there be any more picnics? But the pauses grow longer, filled with the voices of the water and the wood. The air is warm and drowsy, and at last she is

fast asleep, held close to the brown earth, and I, the other one, sit straight, my back to a stout pine, while my thoughts go wandering, gazing in at Eden, at all Edens. Everybody's path skirts so many Edens, of the women friends married, and the men friends married. Passing pilgrim-wise, one garners a walletful of reflections. Looking at my friend lying there asleep on brown pine needles, I know, as every woman must know, that she will never again need me in the old way, and, as every woman must be, I am far too glad to be sorry. The question for each of us, man or woman, outside the fence, is, Will he, will she, still come out sometimes into life's great open and picnic with me? That all depends, does it not? on the newcomer. If he, if she, is a petty person, there are no more picnics. If a man, moving in to possess all sky, all sea, every crack and cranny of the universe, still holds most sacred there that path of a woman's past which she walked, alone, to come to him, he will leave untouched all the little sunny picnic places, for any man big enough to deserve all a woman's past would be far too big to desire it; is not just that the secret of how to have picnics though married?

And still my thoughts go wandering, passing now from the "wap-eradicator" to all

that lies back of it, of our need for it. How fundamentally different the way in which we must both regard that great black pistol lying between us! To her it is a new toy, something she has recently learned to shoot, and deeper, truer, it is the symbol of a husband's protection, while I see beyond it that great fevered army of the unemployed, those who work and want, whose presence makes a weapon necessary. In some way I cannot analyze, I know that I am vaguely glad that I am on their side of the fence; in both my work and play too far away from them, perhaps, and too forgetful, still on their side of the ramparts of Eden, in that strange great world where no one ever is satisfied.

That packet of poetry tossed to earth, to which no new poem has been added for many a month,—will she ever write again, and shall I be glad or sorry, I who know myself how a woman's writing is made? Yet hers is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she remembered,—if she could set to music the purring of her

kettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,—how the sunny words might twinkle on harder, stranger paths! But if happy people remembered, could they then be happy? Oh, dear me, why must I be always asking questions? The wind is blowing, and against that big frowning boulder a buttercup is bobbing in the sun: how many times a day one is glad one does not have to be God, but only has to know Him there, behind this sun-and-shadow curtain we name Life!

But my friend is awake, measuring the time of the master's home-going and ours. She is up, and running down to the waterside. I see her there, slender and tall, light-poised on a stone. Beyond her the opposite hillside looms high, green and gray. Above her ruddy head a shadbush bends itself, russet and white like her own woods-dress. As I look she tosses the water from her cup, and it falls in a great arc of sun-spray against the dusk of the woods.

The home-going is as glad as the going forth, but quieter, with long shadows across the grass. We pass pools where tall trees stand with their feet in the water in the gold light of late afternoon, and all the motionless brown water is bordered bright with marsh-marigolds. We stop at a watering-trough, and I must get out to undo Peggy's

check-rein, and to keep a hand on Mac's collar so that he will not tumble head foremost over the high rail. I hand up a cup to the driver seated, and we drink thirstily, all four of us.

One farm has been happy with a spring paint-brush since our morning passing. Every flower-pot, box, tripod, and that curiously frequent flower-receptacle, the iron boiler, cut in lengthwise section, has been coated with dashing vermilion. Spring had got into their bones on that farm.

Mac lags from time to time, and we have to stop to lug and heave him into the wagon, where he lies across our feet, a panting, restless lap-robe of warm Airedale. Now a curious social phenomenon occurs. The very dogs, which in the morning had nosed Mac in friendliest fashion, come forth and bark and howl at him in his present eminence. It is the old, old story of the proletariat protesting against the plutocrat.

The green spring country is seamed by old stone walls. I do not know why an old stone wall has power to touch my pulses strangely, to set stirring dreams long prisoned. It is some forgotten child association, I suppose, the feeling that an old stone wall gives me, exactly akin, by the way, to that of an old covered bridge, with its magic of mystery-shod hoofs at midnight.

Peggy's hoofs are swift, going home, and the road, although the same, seems twice as short as before. At one point we vary it, cutting across country through a wood of pines. Beneath the pines the earth is all brown unflecked by any sun, and the light is clear amber, except that at the far edge of the grove there are bright gold gleams through the distant tree stems. Above our heads the color is not brown; it is that strange deep gray-blue that makes mysterious the heart of a pine tree where the branches meet the trunk. We have not talked very much to-day, she and I, but here no one could speak any words. These seem the stillest woods in all the world. We draw rein. Suddenly from out uttermost silence there rings the chime of a thrush.

But Peggy stamps and chafes, and Mac is panting. Were the animals urgent just like this, I wonder, when Adam and Eve longed to listen to some archangel's voice?

It is Peggy's will that we get home. The master is there before us, and at the barn. That is another thing I have noticed about husbands, when they are not at "The Works," they are likely to be at the barn, if there is one. Jennie is flying about, singing to her feet to keep them lively while she makes us a dinner. Even when that meal comes I find

I am still dreaming, for I was not, ready to come home. Afterward in the clear May twilight we move forth to doorstep and lawn, It is Peggy's hour for evening cropping. The master leads her about. Every turn of her head, every lift of her foot, is a movement of grace. In the gathering twilight, soft and misty, Peggy seems some beautiful horse stepping delicately out of elfland. Mac is tugging at the other end of her tether rope, and the master is somehow strung between them.

The level meadows flow away before us. The deepening blue of the sky softly puts out the sunset. Suddenly, as at some signal, the frogs begin to pipe from the meadow pool. My friend crosses the dusky lawn to join those others. She moves at Peggy's head in her dim white dress. One star comes out.

Across their heads I see, hardly discernible, the spires of the city, and its red earth-lights, and somehow, although I know all its fever, all its pain, I hear the far crying of its spirit to my spirit, cry of innermost comradeship, the call of Home. I rise now from my seat on the doorstep, signal of good-night. She comes flying to my side; of all the words she might say, she chooses that best one, "It was our very nicest picnic."