University of Virginia Library

XVIII
The Road That Talked

I had walked that way a score of times and never seen that road, yet it must have seen me and singled me out, or else it would never have peeped about from its ambush of berry thicket and swamp and said, "Come." I was sturdily plodding the broad state road, for there is a state road everywhere, white and useful, belonging to everybody,—to the lumbering brown milk-wagons, to the bouncing muddy buckboards, to the motor-cycles with their vibrant chugging, to the skimming automobiles. The state road talks business all the time, incessant talk to blur the hearing; for all good talk is half silence, and the only people who have anything to say are the people who have listened. I was lonely for some one to talk to when the little road beckoned.

The state road always chooses the riverway, always bustles along on the level; how could one ever be friends with a road that never climbed a hill? My feet were trudging the macadam, though growing more gypsyish each moment, when the flash of a red leaf on

a dusty bush, the rustle of an unseen bird, and I saw the little road hailing me, and turned. It was waiting for me, half revealed, half hidden, like a shy, would-be friend, and at first, except for certain gypsy gleams along its fence-rows, it was commonplace enough, it might have been anybody's road.

At first, too, it went along discreetly, it turned and walked parallel with the state thoroughfare, a little apart, it is true, but steadily patterning on the manners of the highway, so that if a traveler had chanced on it, he would have seen nothing unconventional. The little road went along like that, and waited for its friends, but I had faith to believe it would soon begin to climb, that climbing was what it wanted of me. Imperceptibly at first it swerved from the parallel, imperceptibly it mounted a little, so that presently, near as we still were, we could look down at the village.

Then the little road began to talk, politely, pleasantly, but in no wise pregnantly. Its language was meaningless at first, but with a lure, as comrade eyes light to yours above lip-chat that does not need to mean anything. We could go slowly, having all the morning to get acquainted. Together the road and I looked down at the town through a screen of late September leaves.

The place lay in mist, partly of the late-lingering fog, partly of the fires that belong to these days when all the village rakes and burns, and the youngsters tumble and romp and shriek in piles of leaves. All outlines are blurred by a pearly haze, against which eddies the deeper blue of chimney-smoke. Beyond the town the hills are dull gray against the luminous gray of the sky, and between town and hill the river runs, a shining silver sheet, with broken, deep-toned reflections near the bank. Looking eastward through the flickering leaves, I watch the sun steadily shining through, shredding the mist with fires of opal, in gleams of blue and orange and amethyst. Down at the village they see none of this, they know only that the fog lifts, while stubble-gardens, and lawns, and house-fronts all turn brown and bare and commonplace beneath the relentless sun. It is for me to see the opal fires lick up the mist; such cheery little wonders of the road are all for me.

The road keeps silence, letting me listen to the village sounds, musically fused at this brief distance; the shunting of a freight train and its raucous whistle, the ringing of hammers on new scaffolding, the shrilling of the saw-mill, the barking of dogs. All to herself, like the shy one that she is, the little road

murmurs her replies, in the twittering of sparrows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in bared branches, in the scratch and scud of dry leaves that race, the soft thudding of a chestnut burr.

The sun is high, and the wind is blowing, and the comrade road is waiting, genially postponing its sure self-revelation, but a-tiptoe to be off now to the woods, where we may share our fun unmolested, unsuspected. The little road is climbing now beyond mistaking. She is stepping through the woods so familiarly that you might miss her trail if you did n't follow close, for she knows there is no fun in the woods if you can't get lost, can't drop the pack of personality from your shoulder, and grow one with brushwood shadow, or arched branch. When the road said this to me, I began to listen to her for every word that she might say. But stealing ever deeper into the woodland, my path is not talking now, she is singing rather, she is dancing. Suddenly in the deeps of the wood she opens up a long green alley of fairy turf, and waits to see if I will share it with her and go scudding it like a squirrel. The white state-way never dreamed that I could fly, but the little friend-road knew. The road plays with me. Near the rut made by a lumber team, she tosses a handful

of wintergreen berries like flecks of coral for me to garner, and lifts a sudden torch of scarlet oak against some wood-recess black and deep as a cave. Every time she hears the sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into still deeper shadow to be alone with me. Looking to right and left you cannot see the open; the only open is above, in the blue.

In the heart of the woods there is elfland. Trusting me, the little road dared to turn mad, she who had been so circumspect down below in the valley. Of the trees, some were still summer green and some were russet gold and some were claret crimson, so that the sifted light was strange, the light of faery. "There is no state road anywhere," said my mad little path to me, "there is nothing in all the world but wood and sky. You are a tree, a cloud, a leaf,—there is no you! Dance!" In and out through the trees she eddied and whirled, my road, glad as a scudding cloud and mad as the wind, in and out, in and out. Free winds that piped in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced the blue above us, laced branches that swayed to a dance eternal, exhaustless,—round and round we eddied, panting, the road and I, all by ourselves, alone, unguessed, in the heart of the woods. They, too, were drunk with the madness of out-of-doors, Bacchus's maenads.

Then, "Whisk!" cried the little road, we can't long keep up this sort of thing, friend-woman!" She turned sober in an instant, wild laughter dying to bubbling chuckles at itself. The tall trees broke away abruptly on stump-pocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone walls. We had come upon a bustling little farm. My road, the wild and lonely-hearted, was transformed into a chatty neighbor, and turned in cheerily to pass the time of day at the back door. A brisk and friendly farm it was. The orchard jounced us a red apple as we passed, a white-nosed horse thrust head from the barn window and whinnied a welcome. Two shepherd dogs, one a stiffened grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy, barked a dutiful protest, then sniffed and licked genially. There was a baby carriage on the porch, a swing beneath the shaggy dooryard pine, there were geraniums at the window, and gleaming milk-pans on the back porch. Beyond the big house was a whole village of miniature houses, kennels and chicken sheds and corn-cribs, set down cozily anywhere to be handy. The big red barns were chatty with clucking hens. A sunny, sociable, commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on the back steps, to pause and rest there, the road and I. As we chatted, lingering and

happy, of buttermilk and buckwheat and the cut of kitchen aprons, would any one have guessed that this little cozy domestic road, back there beyond the turn, had reeled in bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?

When we were alone again, the road explained, questioning with searching friend-eyes to see if I understood, "Many selves belong to every road that must be always climbing a hill, all alone. Don't you know," laughed the little road, that there was never a dryad but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over her flickering leaf-films and slip into some crofter's cot in Tempe and slap the wheatcakes on the warm hearth-stones?

"And I have other moods as I climb, whispered the little road, as we took hands and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and playing with them, with no one to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out loud in the friendly solitude of little roads like this.

Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too. Maples like great torches of flame studded the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields marched the corn-shocks, a ragged brown battalion. The sky was ever burning bluer

above the hill-crest. Then we left the farm fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pasture, and suddenly the little road said: "Look, a wayside shrine! Let us stop."

Pine trees such as survive now in only a few scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel. Beneath the trees some one had built a rude stone pile, a picnic fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little wildwood road all things are natural. We stood silent on that pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the arching green, supported on its blue-brown pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far tops there went singing an eternal chant. No one ever listened long to that music, all alone, who did not know that it is a hymn older than any creed, and outliving all doubt. In the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted by eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart of all desire, so that, troubled, I asked, "But it was to pray that we stopped?"

"Oh," answered the pagan road, "I never pray, for what is the use of learning how to lisp?—I only praise!"

We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but we were deeper friends when we went on, for there is no bond in friendship closer than the sharing of a faith. Our feet

were springing along as up we went. There were no more farms now, only at last above us the hilltop and the sky, clouds that raced across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and the call of high-winging crows.

The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to say to me this intimacy, "Do you not know my gospel,— that gladness is God? That is why I am always climbing hills. That is why I called you this morning, so that for a little while I and you might step into the sky."