Village Love

Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their vase; and they are all white but one.

"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most dead by mistake."

"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a little shocked line troubled her forehead.

"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next months how."

So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so occupied in[Pg 2] being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May, and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely "To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief indulgence.

This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and fa?ade and well-house, of which in my absence I[Pg 3] have not thought even once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come, they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We too," they say, "have not been idle."

Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights. ("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals of this little garden as a real [Pg 4]gardener in green lore might be signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow marching line of little volunteers.

I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the intruders and not they—and I own that for me the time has never wholly passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet[Pg 5] recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the walk—such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!—and in return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine—an isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say, it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of[Pg 6] the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.

In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives, striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere civility; and I love them all—unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole village has just given to Lyddy Ember:—

"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in, though that was all elegant, but it was the Togetherness of it. I couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin' anybody to neighbour with."

It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as more of us know than have the[Pg 7] wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship, comradeship, kinship—call it what you will. My neighbour and I will understand.

"I heard you was here," my neighbour said—bless her, her voice trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of her voice.

I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the wind—where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that—as is the custom of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and Meeting and Being Together.

I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept house in the world, shared in the common welfare,[Pg 8] toiled as we might for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell our days to their end.

My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as if he knew.